Details of the War
by nikiness
Summary: Two weeks and five days later, Mal declared War. RiverJaynecentric. MalInara. SimonKaylee. HIATUS. I can't promise that I will ever finish this. I'm sorry.
1. PROLOGUE

**TITLE:** Details of the War  
**AUTHOR:** Niki  
**RATING:** NC-17... eventually for graphic violence and teh sexin'.  
**PAIRING:** Gen the moment. Mal/Inara, Simon/Kaylee, & River/Jayne eventually.  
**SUMMARY:** "When Zoe left, he didn't leave his bunk."  
**A/N:** This is one of those epic-y type fics. Oh god, what was I thinking!

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"She's just a... a girl!"

Kaylee's fingers clenched around Simon's wrist and she eased herself in front of him. Mal wouldn't hit him if she was standing right there. He wouldn't risk accidentally catching her instead of Simon.

She hoped.

"I thought we had a talk 'bout you givin' the orders on my boat, Doc." He clenched his jaw tight and Kaylee could see the vein in the side of his neck standing out against the skin. He was angry and it was taking everything that he had not to let his fist get intimate with Simon's mouth.

Simon pressed on, "She's a seventeen--"

"_Eighteen_," River corrected softly from the doorway. "She's eighteen years old and she would like to be treated like she is eighteen years old."

Simon's eyes widened and Kaylee could feel the fight going right out of him. "Eighteen?" He was doing the math in his head now. Subtracting dates and adding days and trying to figure out where in the last five months River's birthday had fallen.

"The twenty-second," River supplied, easing past the three of them to sit down at the table, tracing her fingernails over the grain of the wood, long dark tangles obscured her face. "She's ready, Captain."

"That's good, darlin'." A pause. "Ready for what?"

River blinked. "Her mission. You were going to give her a mission."

Simon's shoulders slumped and he let Kaylee lead him out of the mess hall, mumbling the entire time about River's birthday and trying to figure out how he'd missed it. How he'd forgotten something as important as his little sister's eighteenth birthday.

"We'll wait 'til Zoe and Jayne get back with the provisions and then--"

Serenity's decks tremored and the bay doors opened with a slow grinding and Jayne was bellowing Mal's name at the top of his lungs.

One hand on his gun, Mal went running for the bay with River close on his heels. The mule had tracked sand into the cargo bay and River ran her toes through the grains, making patterns and half-listening.

"There better be a damn good reason you flew in here like a bat outta hell yellin' my name like you was on fire," he threatened, trying to catch his breath.

"There's a war comin'," Zoe said quietly, her fingers clenched a little tighter on the butt of her Carbine and for the first time since they'd put Wash in the ground, there was a spark of something in her voice. Her eyes didn't gloss over Mal's and refocus on a point somewhere to the left of his head, they caught his and held them.

"The Browncoats are startin' up the movement again, Sir. Seems after Miranda there's some talk of the Parliament bein' weakened. People are getting tetchy over the broadcast, not trustin' in the government. They're callin' for volunteers. Anyone who's able and willin'."

Mal's eyes narrowed and his mouth was pressed into a thin line. His lips went white and his jaw clenched up like it did when he yelled at Simon.

River didn't have to know what he was thinking to read his body language.

"No," he said quietly. "Wars long over with now."

He turned, his back rigid and his face closed off. It was like someone had shut a door, none of his thoughts or emotions flickered over his face or made it to his eyes but it was obvious what he was feeling from the rigid set of his shoulders.

"Get this stuff unloaded and then get up to the mess. We got crime that needs doin'."

River's big, dark eyes darted over to Zoe. Her eyes were downcast and her mouth set in a hard line. Like she was struggling not to say something that she wanted to say. Needed to say.

For a minute, River saw shadows of the old Zoe in the set of her shoulders and the way her mouth pressed into a long, thin line when she was thinking hard on something. And then the ghost slipped away and Zoe's shoulders dropped and she moved towards the mule, hefting up a crate of the illegal munitions they were shipping to Beylix.

River drifted out of the bay, trailing sand on the soles of her feet, ghosting in Mal's footsteps. He was sitting in the mess, shoulders hunched forward and his revolver spread out on the table in front of him in pieces.

"Don't look like your brother is ever gonna get used to the idea of you comin' with us on jobs."

River shook her head, pulling her legs up to chin. "Simon won't let the caterpillar become a moth."

The Captain sat back in his chair, sizing her up and reaching for the bottle of inter-engine whiskey Kaylee had made what felt like years ago, when they were whole and loud and never quiet. "Moth?" he asked. "Don'tcha think you're sellin' yourself a little short? I think this caterpillar is more like to turn into a butterfly."

He drained the whiskey and re-assembled the revolver while they waited in silence for Zoe and Jayne to finish unpacking the cargo.

He hadn't cleaned the gun. She could see a trail of dark residue on the table top where the pieces had been sitting. He'd needed something to do with his hands. Something to occupy his mind besides the war and the Independents and Serenity Valley.

When Zoe and Jayne dragged themselves into the mess-- Jayne cursing a blue streak and Zoe looking like her skin weighed too much for her frail bones-- he'd taken the gun apart and re-assembled it four times.

"Sir."

Mal's head shot up and he met Zoe's eyes. Eyes that looked alive for the first time in the five months since Wash had died.

"I'm joining up, Sir."

River watched the flicker of emotions play across Mal's face before his features went hard and blank. He'd shut the door again and the only clues she had to what he was feeling was the way he held his body. His shoulders slumped forward slightly.

"I can't stop you, Zoe." His voice sounded tired. Everyone's voices sounded tired lately. Death and fights and fear had aged them all ten years and Zoe and Mal were wearing it the hardest.

"I know that, Sir," the first mate said, lifting up her head and locking eyes with him. "I'm not asking for your permission. I'm asking you to come with me."

Mal's jaw clenched tight and his fingers idly spun the revolvers chamber. "I already told you no, Zoe."

"You don't mean that, Captain."

"The hell I don't," he gave a brittle laugh. "I mean it sure as I'm sitting here. The war is done. We lost. We did what we had to on Miranda. We did the right thing. And we lost two good men 'cause of it. I don't aim to lose no more. It's over and it's best we just let it die down and keep tryin' to scrape out a living however we can. But if you aim to go, Zoe, I ain't gonna stop you. I ain't got the right."

"Are you really gonna walk away from this, sir? Have you really forgotten everything that we fought for? Everything that _you_ fought for?" Zoe asked, her eyes blazing and her fingers gripping the edge of the table so hard that River half expected the thin skin covering her knuckles to crack.

"Ain't forgotten," he said firmly. "Just ain't got the heart to fight no more, is all."

"I'm going," Zoe repeated, her mouth set in a firm line. River was getting good at reading body language, picking up the tiny little movements that people made, the way they held themselves and the inflection in their voices when they spoke, rather than reading their thoughts. Zoe wasn't going to give in.

"Reckon you best get to packin' then." Mal's voice was tight when he stood up, shoving the weapon into the holster under his left arm and walking purposefully towards the door.

"Reckon I best," the first mate echoed, quietly.

When Zoe left, he didn't leave his bunk.


	2. PART I

**TITLE:** Details of the War (Part One)  
**AUTHOR:** Niki  
**RATING:** NC-17... eventually for graphic violence and teh sexin'.  
**DISCLAIMER:** Not mine.  
**PAIRING(S): **River/Jayne-centric with of Mal/Inara & Simon/Kaylee.  
**SUMMARY: **Two weeks and five days later, Mal declared War.  
**A/N:** Angst! Just so you know. Muchos thanks to my two favoritiest betas, chicafrom3 and ssstupidgirl for listening to me whine and bitch and offering helpful ideas and cleaning up my mistakes. Luff you both. 3

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The day that they received Zoe's body in a silver metal coffin, like the one that Tracey had been delivered in, Mal disappeared into his bunk and didn't come out, even when Kaylee sat outside the door for half an hour.

The coffin sat in the cargo bay for two days before Kaylee sent a WAVE to Inara on Sihnon. The companion had cried when Kaylee had told her. And then she had asked River to come and get her. "I can't sit here in the Companion House and know that he's there... holed up in his bunk and pretending that he's not feeling a thing."

Seven days after Zoe died, River picked up Inara on Persephone and she disappeared into Mal's bunk and when two days had passed and they hadn't come out, Jayne started taking bets on which one of them had killed the other. But no one found it as funny as they usually would have because Zoe's dead body was in the cargo bay, waiting for them to put her in the ground next to her husband.

One week and three days after Mal and Inara emerged from his bunk-- exhausted and quiet and years older than they'd been when they'd disappeared in there in the first place-- they buried Zoe on Haven, next to Wash.

Two weeks and five days after they'd buried Zoe, Mal declared war.

"I ain't sayin' none of ya'll got to sign up. You say the word and I'll drop you off on the next moon we pass," he'd said, voice rough. His eyes were too old for his face and sometimes River wondered how he stood upright with so much guilt on his shoulders. She thought that his knees should give out and he should crumple to the floor.

But he stayed standing.

Kaylee'd signed up first. She'd looked around, took a long sip of her whiskey and said "Serenity's gonna need me if'n you're gonna go and get 'er shot at."

"Do I have to wear brown?" Inara had asked. Her hands were trembling against her mug but River didn't think anyone else had noticed. "Because I look horrible in brown."

"You'd be safe back at that fancy guild house you got," Mal told her, refusing to meet her eyes. "We can get you back there in a weeks time."

"I think I'd find being safe boring," she said softly, with a bitter laugh. "After being on Serenity for so long."

Now, five months and twenty-seven days since Zoe had died, River was easing Serenity into a low valley on one of the border moons.

There were huge rock outcroppings to obscure the ship from gunfire or missiles or anything else the Alliance troops might throw at them. There was enough cover that they could stay relatively well hidden.

Mal was trying to stop thinking about how much this particular valley looked like Serenity Valley.

He was trying not to remember how they'd been stuck there for over a week, eating rats and whatever else they could find because like his Ma'd always said, when your belly touches your backbone, you'd be surprised what you'll put in your mouth.

He was trying not to remember using the dead bodies of his friends as makeshift barriers. He was trying not to remember watching them die, one by one, not from bullets or gas attacks or missiles but most from starvation and sickness.

"You understand what you've gotta do, Lil Witch?" he asked, flipping a few switches to power Serenity down. With out the engine rumbling beneath her feet, River felt unbalanced. Unstable. The hum of Serenity's engine was something she'd taken for granted. A soothing white noise in the background. Its sudden disappearance left her feeling awkward and disjointed.

"Do you?" she retorted, tilting her head to look up at him.

His lips quirked. They had had this conversation before every job he took her on and it comforted him to know that some things were staying the same even though the jobs had turned into battles and instead of the vague possibility of being shot at, it was a solid reality.

"It's what I do, darlin'," he said softly, doing his part with out even thinking about it. The words had lost meaning to him but they comforted him none the less.

With one final flick of a switch, he shut off Serenity's interior lights and handed her a flashlight. "Go see Jayne and get weaponed up."

He was sitting in the cargo bay, loading a delicate looking revolver with clumsy fingers. He didn't look up but River could tell that he knew she was there by the subtle way the muscles in his shoulders corded and tensed and then, slowly, relaxed again.

"Gorram thing's too small fer my fingers," he muttered. "Don't even know why I got the thing in the first place."

"You like tiny things," she told him, moving to stand in front of him. She held her arms straight out and spread her legs a shoulders-width apart so that he could adjust the holsters.

He didn't answer, but the way his spine went rigid spoke for him.

"Gimme your arm," he instructed gruffly, when he'd finally loaded six rounds into the chambers. She obediently held out her left arm and he circled her wrist with one big hand, feeling the steady thump of her pulse under his fingers. He hooked his fingers in the holster she'd strapped across her back and tugged. "That feel alright?"

River nodded and Jayne fitted the revolver into the holster. "No closin' your eyes if'n you gotta shoot someone," he instructed her roughly, giving her a little push backwards, "Liable to wind up on the wrong end of a bullet doin' that."

"She knows. She will sit in the cockpit and keep Serenity company."

"Good." He stood up to leave, his whole body stiff and rigid and she felt him flinch when she wrapped her fingers around his wrist.

"Stop," he muttered, low and hoarse. "Just stop."

"Can't," she murmured softly, tightening her fingers on his wrist. "Can't stop. Don't know how to stop. Don't want to stop."

"We gotta stop," he told her roughly, jerking his arm out of her grip. "Ain't right, us carryin' on like that. You ain't but a slip of a girl and I'm old enough to be your pa." He turned his back on her and walked stiffly towards the bay doors to wait for Mal.

River hesitated and when he didn't turn back to face her, she squared her shoulders and slipped quietly out of the cargo bay.

"Put yer gorram boots on," he growled after her savagely, with out turning around.

Her shoulders slumped slightly and she purposely dragged the soles of her bare feet over Serenity's cold decks on her way back towards the cockpit. The gun felt heavy, pressed into her side but she knew why it was there and she knew she would need it.

She just didn't know why.

A hard knot of worry settled just below her ribcage. She would need the gun, she would fire it. She would kill. And she didn't know why. River couldn't pick out the facts from what was purely her own imagination.

She wondered idly if they'd be bringing any more bodies back to Serenity. This was their fifth firefight and after every skirmish there were bodies stacked up like cord wood in the cargo bay. She couldn't see them-- wouldn't look at them-- but she could hear them at night when everyone else was quiet.

They were all unrecognizable faces. Just kids, really. Younger than her, most of them.

She wondered how long it would take before one of the bodies stacked up neatly in little rows wore a face that she knew. A face that she'd looked at every day for the past two years.

She wondered briefly what it would be like if one of those faces were Jayne's. Her skin felt like it would shake off of her bones when she thought about that, so she tried not to.

Scrunching down under the console, River pulled her knees up to her chin and dug her fingers into her thighs. Waiting. For anything. Any sound, any movement, that didn't belong.

When she heard it, she had been wedged under the console for nine hours. Her legs had gone numb and she'd just finished reciting the periodic table backwards and then forwards and then in alphabetical order, to keep herself from falling asleep.

It was so soft she could barely hear it. A faint scratching on Serenity's hull but her gut clenched up in tight little knots and she slid her hand around the revolver's barrel.

Jayne called her Emmy.

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"You hear that?" Mal demanded, jerking his head up.

The ground was shaking and there was a soft rumbling, barely audible over the sounds of people dying all around him. Jayne lifted his head up and squinted, nursing the bullet wound in his left shoulder.

Mal'd cleaned it out with whiskey the best he could and bandaged it up but the bullet was too deep for him to pull out with just his fingers. It'd have to wait until they could get back to Wesher Colony and pick up Simon and Kaylee.

"I hear it," Jayne muttered, swiping the sweat out of his eyes. "But what the hell is it?"

Mal's eyes darted towards his troops, a few feet down the trench from him and Jayne. He motioned that they should stay where they were and began creeping along the edge of the pit until he reached a place where he could easily pull himself up on the fire step and not get his head blown off his shoulders.

Nothing to the left but people dying and missiles blowing huge craters out of the rock and dirt around them. A few riderless horses were panicking and running towards anything they could, but that wasn't enough to cause the rumbling.

When he turned to the right, he swore up and down and back again before dropping back down into the hollowed out piece of Earth.

"Serenity," he said gravely, trying not to worry about River. She could more than take care of herself. But somehow, that didn't reassure Mal. "Somehow they knew she was up in them hills and they're all over 'er like like maggots on week old rations."

Jayne winced when he pulled himself to his feet. "How many of 'em?"

"'Bout half a dozen ships. Don't know how they figured out she was up there. River hid her good," Mal was fumbling in his pockets for the com link. He needed to tell River to power his girl up and get both their pi gus out of there.

"They got in yet?" Jayne demanded, his voice tight. "They found the girl?"

Mal hazarded a sideways glance towards his mercenary-- his soldier.

"You got somethin' goin' on with that lil' girl?" he asked casually, using bandaged hands to fiddle with the com to get it to pick up River's signal.

Jayne's eyes narrowed and he hunched his shoulders, then winced. "Nah, Mal. Ain't got nothin'."

The Captain, turned Colonel, nodded. "S'good," he mumbled, only half-listening. The com crackled to life and he could hear shooting through the static. "Lil' Albatross?"

No answer.

"River?" he barked, frantically pushing down the fear building up below his ribcage. A Colonel didn't get scared. He did the right thing. He made the decisions. And decisions made out of fear were never the right thing. The girl was fine. "Captain Tam, you have exactly two seconds to make your position known."

When all that they got out of the com was more static and the crack of rapid gunfire, Jayne cursed under his breathe. With Vera strapped across his chest, he threw himself up and over the side of the trench, scrambling over the two feet of sandbags to protect them from shell fire behind them.

"Ni shi bai chi," Mal muttered under his breath, before swinging himself up over the sandbags and running after Jayne, so low to the ground that he was almost on his hands and knees. For someone who'd kept himself alive for thirty years working as a mercenary, he was actin' like a ruttin', wet-behind-the-ears fool.

He caught up to Jayne in a few quick yards and tackled him to the rough ground, scraping up his elbows as they rolled a few feet and finally stopped. "Zhu tou," he growled. "There are six gorram boats up there and every one of 'em is strapped with artillery and filled up full of soldiers. Now what are you gonna do? Run up there and get yourself shot full of holes?"

Jayne growled, throwing him off and struggling to his feet. "And what are you going to do? Leave that little girl up there with half a dozen ships full'a government men?"

"No," Mal said sharply, "I'm gonna drag your pi gu back to that trench, demote you and then I'm gonna get River on the com link and tell her to get my boat the hell out of here. I wouldn'ta left her on that ship if I didn't think she couldn't handle herself, Jayne. You don't get to question me when I'm your captain and you sure as gan tsao don't get to question me when I'm your commanding officer, dong ma?"

"Demote me!" the mercenary demanded, holding his injured arm closer to his body. "Gorram, Mal, I di'n't do nothin' wrong."

A shell hit the ground a few yards away from them, knocking both men off of their feet and cutting off Mal's response. On their hands and elbows, they belly-crawled back towards the trench, Jayne darting looks behind them at the cliff that hid Serenity and River.

"Sir?" the younger men were watching the Colonel intently when Mal and Jayne dropped back down into the hole.

"You just hold steady, O'Neal," Mal grumbled. "We ain't ready to do no shootin' just yet."

He fished around in the pockets of his coat again and then cursed loudly. "Gorramit, Jayne. All that running and crawlin' around and I don't got the gan tsao com anymore. You happy now! I should bust your ass down to corporal for this go se."

"Awww, Mal," Jayne began, a hint of whining creeping into his voice. Another loud explosion behind them cut Jayne off and both of them scrambled for the fire step Smoke was pouring out of the hidey-hole that River had maneuvered Serenity into and Jayne let out a string of curses.

Mal grabbed a handful of the back of Jayne's jacket as another explosion rocked the canyon. Pieces of stone and bits of wood rolled down the valley walls and with a loud grinding noise, Serenity slid out of the canyon, sliding down the rocks on her belly until with a roar, her engines came to life and River pulled her up into the air.

"Girl might just got a little bit of Wash in her after all," Mal mumbled appreciatively as he watched his ship outmaneuvered the two remaining Alliance boats. River swung so low that they could feel the hot air left in her wake. She didn't have a lot to work with, being alone on the boat. There was no Kaylee in the engine room, giving her more power and keeping her from blowing herself up.

River swooped low, and Serenity's airlock doors flapped open, dropping the cache of bombs that Jayne had shoved into place before they'd left the boat, on the Alliance trenches. The air smelt like smoke, acrid and heavy, and Jayne yanked his T-shirt up over his nose and mouth and struggled to breathe.

Serenity faltered in the sky, jerking downwards suddenly, so low that she nearly dragged her belly on the ground before River gained some altitude again and took off towards the other side of the canyon, the two Alliance cruisers trailing after her.

"She ain't gonna make it," Mal hissed, watching River push Serenity into a full burn towards the top lip of the canyon. But the ship was lagging and there were breaches in the ships underbelly. She was losing too much altitude too fast and the enemy ships were bearing down on her.

"They're gonna shoot her right outta the sky," Jayne growled, watching as River lost more momentum and Serenity lagged dangerously. The ships on her tail were almost on top of her and Mal had to wonder why they hadn't blown more holes in his boat already.

When the Alliance cruisers were directly over top Serenity, he realized they must have been planning to drop missiles down on her all at once. Jayne's gut clenched up into knots and his skin itched to start shooting, but not even Vera could breach a steel hull and so far no one'd been able to get a clear shot with the M30. There wasn't anything he and Mal could do but watch River get blown out of the sky and hope that there was enough of her for Simon to put back together when it was all over.

There was a low grinding sound and Serenity's thrusters flipped and suddenly the ship was heading back towards the canyon wall. Jayne broke into a run and sprinted down to trench until he reached the big machine gun mount weighted down by sandbags on the lip of the trench and braced it against his shoulders, howling with pain as the handles of the M30 dug into his bullet wound.

He sighted one of the ships, digging his heels into the earth of the fire step and fired. The gun rocked back into his shoulders and Jayne gritted his teeth in pain. If he ever had working use of his arm again he would hit Mal for dragging him into this gorram war in the first place.

The ship went into a slow tail spin and fell the last thirty feet to the ground, one wing breaking off and sliding into the trenches that hid the Alliance shoulders, he could hear them screaming. The second boat was too big to turn quickly and slammed into the canyon wall in front of it. When it hit the valley floor, the ground under Jayne's feet shook.

Overhead, River circled around and brought the ship back around to land in the space between the two trenches, providing the Independents cover to creep out of their trenches. Jayne fell backwards, sagging against the wall of the trench behind him.

"You alright?" Mal asked, tightening his grip on his gun as the remaining Alliance soldiers who hadn't been killed by River's sweep or the shrapnel from the fallen cruisers crawled out of their trenches like rats and swarmed the ship.

"I'm fine," he growled, "Go on up."

Mal gave a curt nod and swung himself up on the fire step, yanking himself up over the sandbags and darted into the cover of his ship, dropping down and crawling under the boat, picking off purple bellies. The bay doors were still open and Jayne caught a movement in the shadows. The girl was creeping out of the ship, the revolver he'd prepped for her earlier in hand.

Grabbing his own gun, Jayne swung himself over the edge of the trench and crept along Serenity's edge. River caught him with her big dark eyes and turned to face him. River's eyes widened when Jayne lifted up his gun and leveled it at her.

She flinched when he fired off two shots. She could feel them pass through the air over her left shoulder and a shiver worked it's way up her spine. He caught her large, scared eyes and jerked his chin behind her. An Alliance soldier was crumpled on the ground at her heels.

River turned and ran, disappearing back into the dark safety of the ship, leaving Jayne to sag to the ground as the Mal's platoon rounded up prisoners.

"Remember," Mal called out, squeezing off another shot. "A prisoner is another day's rations taken out of your own mouths." And Jayne knew that by the end of this, there wouldn't be any prisoners left to be taken.


	3. PART II

**A/N:** This was intended to be much longer. Unfortunately, my muse had other ideas and insisted that this chapter was meant to be ended here. Muchos thanks (as always) to chicafrom3 and ssstupidgirl who rool the skool.

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"Hey," Jayne murmured, grabbing onto the strap of River's holster to stop her. The girl's hair hung in long tangles in her face and there were dark rings under her eyes. She hadn't been sleeping very well-- if at all-- lately. It didn't take a reader to see the exhaustion dragging on her body.

She looked up at him expectantly, fidgeting with the front of her dress. Her hands looked tiny and pale against the dark material.

"I didn't mean to scare ya earlier," he said gruffly. He shifted uncomfortably and let his hand drop from the leather strap across her back. "I di'n't know how ta tell ya that he was behind ya and I didn't want ya to make no sudden moves."

River ducked her head, nodding it almost imperceptibly. "She understands. She should not have left the ship. She was just worried."

Jayne sighed, grabbing onto the girl's shoulder with the hand that wasn't in a sling and wheeling her around to face him. "Stop it with this 'she' _go se_, all right?" he growled. "Just makin' yerself sound crazier."

River shrugged him off, taking a few steps backwards and ducking into the tangles of her hair so that he couldn't make out her face. "Captain wants us," she whispered softly. Her voice sounded strained and he wished he hadn't been so harsh but the words had been said and there weren't gonna be no taking them back now. It just made him feel a whole helluva lot worse when she talked about herself in the third person like that. He already knew that what he'd done with that girl was wrong, but her talking and carrying on like that just made it all the more clearer.

And clarity was something Jayne could do with out, least ways, when it came to this particular matter.

"He wants us in the galley," she said, tilting her head to the left like she was listening for something. Maybe she was. "He's angry?"

"Always is, ain't he?" Jayne muttered, trying unsuccessfully to remove the holster strapped to his thigh one handed. Simon'd patched him up decent but he'd put the merc's arm in a sling and told him to rest it for a few days. Which weren't gonna be easy.

They'd left troops to occupy that particular moon but the Alliance purple-bellies were heading for Beylix next. If they took Beylix, the Independents supplies would be drastically reduced, so they were heading there, hoping to prevent or ward off an out and out attack.

Wouldn't be likely though and Jayne was preparing himself for a week or more of trench fighting.

He wasn't used to being jealous of the doc, sitting all warm and cozy in whatever colony they dropped him off at with Inara and Kaylee to tend to the wounded. Of course, he doubted that Simon's lily-white _pi gu_ could last a week in one of the Independents' trenches. Slogging through dirty mud and waking up to rats the size of house cats sitting on a man's face weren't something a fancy core-bred doctor-boy like him was like to be able to handle.

River took a few hesitant steps towards him, her tiny hands darting out to unfasten the holster. Jayne fixed his eyes on the wall directly behind her and ignored the fact that those tiny little hands were dangerously close to his man parts. "What's he got his panties in a wad over this time?" Jayne demanded. Anything to keep his mind off of River's hands ghosting over his thigh.

"Angry," she murmured, finally unbuckling the holster and letting her fingertips brush the inside of Jayne's leg. She was gratified when he twitched involuntarily and his hands clenched up into fists. "Trying to understand how they found me. Can't."

Jayne grunted and started for the mess, River dogging his steps. He could feel those big, dark eyes burning holes in between his shoulder blades and he hunched his shoulders to try to get rid of the feeling.

In the galley, Simon and Kaylee were at the stove, fixing something that smelled a lot like real vegetable soup in a big metal pot. Mal was pacing, his hands taping at his thighs in agitation.

"I can't figure it out," he growled. "They didn't have no way of knowin' where we hid Serenity but they were all over her."

Jayne edged in close to Kaylee and peeked over her shoulder into the pot. She smacked at him with the wooden spoon she'd been stirring with. "_Gorram_," he exclaimed. "That's real soup. Not that rationed out _go se_."

Kaylee'd grinned proudly. "Yup. Some of the people on Wesher gave us the fixin's so that we could make it up tonight for everyone. They sure was nice folk."

She swatted Jayne's hand away when he tried to reach into the pot for a piece of what looked like real beef floating next to some potatoes. He flashed her a hurt look and cradled his hand against his chest. "Damn it, woman. I ain't got but one good'un as it is."

"Sit," Mal demanded gruffly, kicking one of the chairs away from the table. Jayne scowled and grumbled under his breath but slouched down into one of the chairs and folded his arms over his chest the best he could. The

Monoxceline-B Simon had given him after he had removed the bullet and stitched up Jayne's shoulder had kicked in sometime while he was cleaning his weapons and it was all he could do not to put his head down on the table and sleep for days.

It was exhausting carrying bodies of boys who should still be chasing after girls and fooling around in haylofts into the cargo bay and stacking them up like cord word. Bodies piled six or seven deep in neat little rows on one side of the bay and the boys that were still alive sleeping on makeshift bunks on the other. They'd strung up a partition as best they could but those boys still knew that when they went to sleep their brothers or cousins or best friends were lying dead on the other side of that flimsy wall.

"Gotta figure out how they knew," Mal muttered under his breath as lil' Kaylee put a bowl full of the soup down in front of him. "Ain't gonna do us no good if Serenity can't even get up into the air."

Serenity was their power punch. When things started getting bad, Mal would signal River and she would swoop in from out of whatever nook or cranny they had her holed up in this time and lay down a cover for them or do a sweep of the enemy trenches.

Jayne had to wonder why they hadn't tacked on Serenity's new hardware a long time ago. Would have come in damn useful over the last few years. 'Specially that day in Mr. Universe's complex. A few extra bullets and a little more firepower hadn't ever hurt anybody.

But the past was the past and there weren't going to be no changing it now. No amount of wishing and wondering was going to change the fact that Wash and Zoe were buried together on Haven next to the Shepard-- the only man besides Jayne's own Pa who'd ever bothered to see any good in him-- and Mr. Universe himself. It didn't change the fact that there was a war going on and that he was no mere mercenary anymore. He was Major Jayne Cobb of the Independent Army, serving under Colonel Malcolm Reynolds in the 57th regiment.

It was easy to forget, though, sometimes. Tucked away in his bunk that still looked the same. Guns on the rack behind his bed, dirty clothes in piles on the floor and nudie pictures of buxom blondes up on the wall, he could forget that they weren't just flying off to their latest crime. They were flying off to the latest battle where he stood a very real chance of being blown to pieces and shipped home to his Ma in a box.

He tried not to think about that.

"You could just... uh, leave Serenity with us, then," Simon pointed out, tugging on his earlobe as he sat across from Kaylee at the table. "And River..."

Doc hadn't been too thrilled when his little sis had gone and signed up right behind Jayne and Mal. Hell, Jayne and Mal hadn't been too keen on the idea anyway. But River'd made up her mind and she was old enough and stubborn enough to do as she pleased.

She'd come back to the ship, grinning ear to ear and proudly displayed the triangular patch identifying her rank. Captain River Tam of the Independent army. Pilot of the 57th regiment.

Mal'd gone down into his bunk and hadn't come out for near a day and when he had, he hadn't been too pleased with anyone. There'd been more than one fist thrown that day between him and Simon before River had stepped in, using a string of curse words she could only have learned from Jayne.

Each of them blamed the other for not stopping her and both had had the decency to look properly chastised when she'd set them straight. She was a grown woman and she could make her own decisions. She'd been thinking a lot clearer since she'd gotten Miranda's secrets out of her head and the combination of medications and diet had straightened her out enough that she could filter out most everyone's thoughts but her own.

"She can stay," she'd told them sharply, "and protect her family. Keep Serenity safe. Or she can go and find another regiment to take her."

River was his real reason for wanting Serenity to stay behind with the three of them when the fighting started. Jayne had to admit, he'd done good letting the girl grow up a little, but apron strings were harder to cut for the one wearing the apron than the one dangling at the end of it.

He knew from experience and the box of colorful knitted hats under his bed that his ma sent faithfully every winter. They were exact replicas of the hats that he'd worn as a boy, growing up on a moon with some of the harshest winters around those parts.

"Nope," Mal said firmly, ending the discussion. "We need River and we need Serenity and we just gotta figure out how those purple-bellies stay one step ahead of us all of a sudden."

Jayne cast a sideways glance at River. Her eyes were unfocused, staring a hole in the grain of the tabletop. Her hands were clenched tight in her lap. So tight that he imagined there were little half-moon cuts on her palms.

He nudged her with his elbow to knock that vacant look off her. Mal's sharp eyes picked up the tiny movement and he studied them both for a second before focusing in on River. "What's wrong, lil' Witch?" he asked, drawing everyone's attention to River.

"Readers," she said slowly, her eyes slowly coming back into focus as she lost whatever train of thought she'd been following.

"_Mei-mei_?" Simon asked, half-standing. His eyes darted behind him where his medical bag lay turned over on it's side on the floor and Jayne snorted in disgust. Of course, he couldn't blame the doc, medicine was all the boy knew. He'd grown up believing that there weren't a thing in the 'verse that couldn't be fixed with the right amount of chemicals.

"They have readers," River said slowly, matter-of-fact.

"You know that for a fact, little Witch?" Mal asked cautiously. "Or are you just generalizin'?"

River paused again, staring down intently into her soup like it was a crystal ball and it held all of their answers. Everyone was still, focusing on River and trying to pretend like they weren't. Didn't want to make the girl nervous or something.

Finally, she nodded. "They took them from the academy. Plucked them up when they were ripe and put a shiny helmet on their head. Sent them off to war with a hug and a kiss."

Mal swore, a long and nasty string of Chinese and shoved his bowl away from him so hard that some of the soup splashed over the side and made a puddle under the dish. For a minute, Kaylee looked like she was going to say something about wasting what they didn't often have but a look at Mal's face silenced her.

"We're done for," he muttered, standing up and shoving his chair in angrily. "Might as well just throw up our white flags now 'cause we ain't no chance in hell if they got people over there as can read our minds. Any ground we take, or think on taking they're gonna know. Any offensive we come up with, their gonna know."

He swore again, his face stained with anger and hopelessness.

"We try holing up anywhere... and they're gonna know. Gonna see right through any _gorram_ plan we come up with."

River's eyes widened and she turned away from her soup bowl, catching Mal's eyes with her own. "No," she murmured, almost falling out of her chair and backtracking across the room. "No, no, no, no." In one quick, graceful movement, River turned and fled and Jayne could hear the sound of the hatch slamming down after her and sealing her in Kaylee's old bunk.

Simon fixed Mal with an accusing stare. "What!" he demanded. "What was that! Someone tell me what is going on here!"

Mal didn't answer him, he paused for a moment, his brow knitted together, staring after his pilot, before wordlessly leaving his soup bowl untouched and sliding past Jayne on his way out of the galley.

Simon opened and closed his mouth, staring after Mal. Whatever he wanted to say, though, died on his lips. His shoulders hunched and he looked defeated. Looked to Jayne like the doc was finally getting used to River having secrets from him and he weren't liking it none.

Simon glanced over at him and Jayne quickly turned his face back down towards his food. He felt like what he'd done to the girl was written across his forehead. He half expected Mal and Simon to be able to read it, clear as day, all across his face.

His gut clenched with guilt and dread and he tried desperately to shove it into the back of his mind and pay attention to the forced and strained conversation Kaylee and Inara were having.

It'd been this way, mostly, since Miranda. Since there were two empty seats at Serenity's dinner table and seven people trying desperately to ignore the fact that they were empty. Now there were six people trying to ignore three empty chairs, all of them tiptoeing around the ship like they were walking in a minefield.

Zoe and Wash's room stood untouched, sealed off like some morbid museum. But Jayne wasn't gonna be the one to go down there and clean all their shit out and neither was anyone else. They were all waiting for the other to make the first move and no one was willing to step forward. Besides, it weren't like they were going to need it for anything.

He sure as hell weren't gonna be the one to sleep down there.

So they just kept walking around on eggshells, pretending that there weren't three empty seats at the table. And Jayne sure as hell weren't gonna be the one to point out the elephant in the room.

------------------------------------

"I'll do it," River said quietly.

Mal's head jerked up and his spine went rigid. River wondered for a minute if it would snap in half before she dismissed the thought as silly. "No," he said firmly, holding up his hands towards her, like he needed to stave her off. "No, no, no. Ain't no way in hell, Lil' Albatross."

"It was your idea," she retorted, slipping quickly into the pilot seat and pulling her knees up to her chin. "It was your plan and you dismissed it but it's valid. It could work and it would save us and I am the only one who can do it."

"Yeah, well, won't be the first stupid idea I ever had," he grumbled. "And it ain't your decision to make."

River's eyes narrowed and her fingers curled over the edge of the chair's arms. Her voice rose in pitch, "It is not _his _decision to make!" she exclaimed.

"It ain't a good idea, River," he said firmly. "It was a gorram stupid one and I'da been a fool if I'dve broughten it up. Asides, sending you back there would kill your brother."

"She could make him understand," River argued. "He could see. We will lose and lives will be lost."

"Asides," Mal said, trying to sound lighthearted. "Who'd fly my boat then?"

River cast him a look from under dark lashes. "You would. Like you did before Wash and before I could." She paused. "She is..._ I_ am not always sane, Captain, but I'm not always crazy either. I can do this. I can win this."

Mal sighed, rubbing his temples and looking years older than he had any right to look. "Ain't a game, Lil girl," he muttered as she slipped out of the cock pit, "Ain't a game."


	4. PART III

**A/N:** Again, I intended this chapter to be a little longer than it is, but my muse decided that enough was enough and ended it here._ :shakes fist:_As always, much thanks to my betas, chicafrom3 and ssstupidgirl, who totally own your souls.

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It was like he'd conjured her up, just by thinking about her.

When River dropped down into his bunk, he'd been thinking about the way her skin had felt, pressed up against his. How gorram warm she'd been, the way her little hands had wrapped around him.

And then there she was, dropping down like a ghost into his bunk, her bare feet barely making a sound on the metal flooring.

He flinched but didn't reach for his gun, tucked under his pillow. There wasn't any point in pretending like he didn't know that it was her, ghosting along the bulkheads.

"What'dya want?" he asked, staring up at the ceiling, refusing to meet her eyes. Those eyes had gotten him into worlds of trouble before. Big, brown and trusting. Wide and naïve and all-knowing all at once. Those eyes were a mess of contradictions.

"To talk," she said quietly, slipping closer. "Can she sit?"

He shrugged, hunching up his shoulders and wincing at the sudden pang from the gunshot wound. She sat down at the very edge of his bed and scooted back against the wall, drawing her knees up and looking very much like a child and not at all like someone who should be in the bunk of someone like him.

"Well," he grumbled, refusing to meet her eyes and looking straight ahead. "Talk."

The girl sighed and he could see her picking at the front of her dress with anxious fingers out of the corner of his eye.

"His thoughts are hurtful," she said slowly, her voice small. "They poke at her like needles."

"Thought I told you to stop with that 'she' _go se_," he snapped, his mouth pressing together in a thin line.

The girl looked down and clenched her hands up tight in her lap. "She is sorry," she said softly. Then after a few minutes. "_I _am sorry."

Jayne grunted, but didn't say anything. "You ain't talking," he pointed out, after a minute.

"Isn't easy to make everything come out the way it is in my head," she admitted after a minute. "I never know what I'm saying."

Jayne's face softened a little bit. "You should git on to bed," he said and his voice was still gruff.

"Can't," she responded. "Can't sleep. Don't want to sleep when he lies here with needles in his eyes."

"Don't start your crazy talk again." Jayne scowled. "Shouldn't oughta be down here anyways. Ain't right. Nothin' about this is right." _Nothin' bout what I did to her was right_, he added in his head.

"Didn't do anything _to_ her," River argued. "She wanted it. She needed it and desired it. She stretched and bent like a girl. A real girl."

He didn't say anything about her lapse into 'she' and 'her', but his scowl deepened. "Ain't right," he repeated stubbornly. "You ain't nothin' but a half-crazy lil' girl and I'm more'n old enough to know better."

River slumped against the wall, folding in on herself. She felt like a little girl, clumsy and awkward and unsure, around him. The women up on his walls, the women he bought and paid for, they weren't clumsy or uncertain. Their hands were strong and steady, their bodies knew what to do and when.

Hers knew how to kill, theirs knew how to please.

She'd been stupid for thinking that she'd be different. Stupid for thinking that she was more than a piece of trim for a man who'd been up in the sky too long and would settle for anything warm, wet and willing.

"Did you..." River trailed off. "Did you have intercourse with her?"

Jayne flinched, remembering the look on the girl's face when she'd walked into the bar with her brother and Kaylee. He'd been sitting there with Mal and Zoe, pretty as you please, with a whore in his lap, playing cards. He'd felt her eyes burning holes in him from across the room.

"Yeah," he said finally, "Fucked 'er good, too." Jayne waited, hands half-clenched into fists, for her to catch his lie.

She didn't call him on it, just slipped back out of his bunk just as quiet as she'd slipped in. With a groan, he slumped down onto his bed and squeezed his eyes tight. Nope, weren't nothing right about this at all.

When he was still staring up at the ceiling an hour later, he sighed and heaved himself up on one elbow. The box was small, wrapped up in brown paper and inconspicuous, wedged up under his cot.

Jayne shoved his feet into his untied combat boots and tucked it up under his arm. The girl wasn't sleeping when he hesitated outside her door. He almost wished she was. Then he'd have a reason for turning himself right back around and slinking back to his bunk.

He could tell himself he'd tried, at least, that way.

But the girl was awake. She was laying there on her back, eyes open and blank and for a moment he worried that Simon'd gone and doped her up again. But there weren't no call for that and Simon was a lot of things but he was also a good brother.

Overprotective like any brother should be, but a good brother.

He didn't go around pumping his sister full of sedatives unless he felt like he had a damn good reason to do it. And River hadn't been giving him a reason, as of late.

He cracked the door open just big enough for him to hunker into her room and toss the package down on her bed. She looked up at him with wide, surprised eyes. "Forgot to give that to ya, earlier. When you was down there," he grunted, by way of explanation.

Jayne felt too big and out of place in River's room. It fit her, dainty and small. His mama'd always used to say he was like a bull in a china shop and he felt like one, standing in the middle of all her girly things.

"Well?" he muttered. "You gonna open that or not?"

The girl gave a quick little nod and shook the package before she settled down to open it. Her nimble fingers ripped the brown paper off and tugged at the lid.

Inside was a girly looking revolver. It had a deep opal handle and an automatic reloader. Nothing Jayne would have bought for himself.

"He bought her... a gun?" she asked, her big brown eyes going wide. She flashed him a brilliant smile, like she'd completely forgotten that just an hour ago she was leaving his bunk in tears.

Seemed his daddy was right, a little bit of flash and shine and a girl fell to pieces.

"Yeah, well," Jayne muttered, rubbing a hand over the back of his head and shifting uncomfortably. "Seems you're in as much danger as the rest of us. Didn't seem fair, you not carryin' yer own gun. Customized the trigger for ya." He shifted again and he suddenly felt like his skin was too hot and too tight for his body. "It'll be easier for ya to shoot with."

She wrapped her arms around his waist and hugged tight and if he thought he was feeling uncomfortable before, he was about ready to crawl out of his own skin now. Her touching him-- flattening her little body up against him-- brought back all kinds of thoughts and feelings that were best left unthought and unfelt.

He untangled himself from the girl and slid the door open, pausing to glance back at her, sitting there on her bed and staring at that gun like it was a piece of chocolate and she was starving half-to-death.

"Didn't fuck 'er, either," he muttered and then she was left staring at the back of the rice paper door.

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"Mal?"

Inara's voice was soft and soothing but she wasn't the person he wanted to see right now. Inara had a way about her that twisted him up and turned him all around and right now he needed to be sure. Steady.

"Ain't up for discussion," he said firmly. "We need Serenity and River out there."

"Simon didn't send me," she promised, slipping quietly into the mess. She hesitated for a few seconds until he sat back and met her eyes, jerking his chin towards one of the chairs. Inara bit back a bitter laugh, that would be her only invitation to stay.

She slipped down into one of the chairs as gracefully as she could manage, her body sore from bending over sickbeds all day. Aching from the strain of helping Simon lift and tug their bloody patients onto any flat surface that wasn't already covered with a body so that he could operate. Exhausted from watching people die under their hands.

But she'd chosen this. He'd pushed and he'd pushed, trying to send her back to the guild house. He'd given her a million reasons to leave and she'd retaliated with a million reasons why she should stay. But sometimes she had to remind herself that _she_ had chosen this.

She'd chosen death and pain and washing blood off her hands and out from under her fingernails over the safety of the guild house.

She had chosen fear and worry over living in comfort and luxury, pretending that there was no war going on just outside their doorway.

She'd chosen Mal, over faceless, nameless clients who bought her body by the pound. He just didn't know it yet. And she didn't expect that she would tell him any time soon.

"You havin' second thoughts?" he asked finally, taking a long sip of his whiskey. Inara couldn't remember a time when he didn't have a glass of whiskey in his hand.

The war was wearing hard on him, tugging at his bones and lining his face and making him look harder than ever.

Then again, she didn't half-recognize the woman staring back at her from the mirror anymore. She looked older and harder. There were lines around her mouth now. They made creams and powders for that, but somehow, watching kids much younger than her die every day made that seem just a little less important.

"No," she told him firmly. "No second thoughts."

No second thoughts, because for better or for worse, she was in this. She'd jumped and there wasn't any turning around and climbing back up the ledge. She wouldn't fit in there, anymore. She'd seen too much and done too much and it'd changed her too much for her to pretend that it hadn't.

Mal poured her a shot of whiskey and she downed it all at once, grimacing as it burned it's way down her throat.

"Kaylee's," he said, nodding at the bottle. "Think it's half-turpentine, myself."

She laughed at that one, but it was a hollow laugh. It didn't feel right to be laughing when there were stacks of dead in the cargo bay and right this very minute some battle was being fought and lost and mere kids were dying before they even got a chance to live.

"River's got a plan," he told her. The words came fast, like he needed to tell someone because it was eating him up inside. And when it all came out, she knew it would still be eating him up inside but at least he wouldn't be alone.

"And you don't like it?"

"Wants me to turn 'er in. Send her back to them bastards at that school'a hers," he slurred, staring hard at the glass and refusing to meet her eyes. "Says she'll be our intel on the inside. Give us the upper hand that they got."

He fell quiet and Inara inwardly cringed. It was a good plan and it was a horrible plan. Simon would fall to pieces. If anything went wrong, Mal would never stop blaming himself and Simon would never stop blaming Mal. There was too much uncertainty in this, too much could go wrong.

But it was a good plan.

"Can't she just... read their thoughts? From here?" the former companion asked.

Mal snorted and shook his head. "'Course not. That'd be too much like easy. Says she can't 'cause she's not 'finished'. Says she can't pick out individual thoughts, 'specially not if she ain't right close up on 'em."

"What are you going to do?"

Mal gave another mirthless laugh. "Don't rightly know yet. But it's gotta be right," he took another hard sip of the hooch. "Can't make no mistakes."

"Everyone makes mistakes," she said softly. She'd made plenty of them to be an authority on the subject.

And then they were touching. His hands sliding roughly into her hair and hers tugging insistently at the suspenders crisscrossing his back.

His mouth was hard and urgent, pressed so hard against her own that she could taste blood. They barely made it down to his bunk before he had her dress pooled at her feet and his hands were tugging on her body, rough and impatient.

His hips bucked when her hand closed around his cock and she knew, this was wrong. This was wrong and he was drunk and she hadn't told him that she loved him.

It seemed important for him to know that before they did this.

But his mouth was wet and open on her nipples and his hands were tugging her forward. And it was just so easy to drop down onto his cock. His hands were tight on her hips and he groaned, mumbling in Chinese. Mal's hips bucked and she moved like she was on auto-pilot.

Her mind wasn't all there but her body was well-disciplined. Up and down. Squeeze. Rock forward. Up and down. Her body knew what to do even if her mind was torn into two pieces.

This was wrong. It felt right. He didn't know she loved him. It didn't matter.

Inara squeezed her eyes shut and tightened her grip on his shoulders. Her mind was torn to pieces, but her body knew exactly what to do.


	5. PART IV

**A/N:** Muchos thanks to my beta, lj userChicafrom3 . Any mistakes are totally her fault and everyone should send her hatemail. :) Just kissing, I luff joo, pookie.

River traced over the gun's barrel, her fingertips dipping in and out of the crevices and circling around the trigger guard.

She toyed with it, transferring it back and forth between her hands and rubbing her thumb absently over the trigger guard. She could barely see the welding marks where Jayne had carefully made it smaller and easier for her to handle. The trigger itself wasn't as stiff and she didn't have to struggle with it like she did his own guns to fire.

River peered down at the trigger guard. It would have taken Jayne hours of careful work to customize. She gently palmed the gun, imagining his large hands clumsily welding the pieces together with her in mind.

She glanced down worriedly at the planet swirling below her. Every so often she could see a mushroom cloud of smoke from an explosion and her grip on Serenity's controls would tighten.

The comlink, her only link to the Colonel and Jayne, remained silent. The last thing Mal'd told her, in a hurried voice, was that there were too many skiffs down there for her to break atmo.

He was right, with out Kaylee in the engine room, River was limited in what she could do. She'd barely managed to out maneuver the Alliance skiffs that had been targeting her during their last battle.

She'd put Serenity on autopilot and run to the engine room, trying to do the work of two people and barely managing. They'd just gotten lucky that Serenity hadn't taken any direct hits while River had been in the engine room.

Kaylee had fought to be allowed to stay onboard Serenity during the battles, but Mal had put his foot down, saying he needed her out of harms way, fixing up whatever needed fixing.

"Ain't gonna be no one to put her back together if you get shot down with her," he'd told her, not unkindly.

So that had left Mal and Jayne on the ground, doing the legwork and keeping the platoon together and River up in the sky, doing her best and just barely making it.

Sometimes, she liked to think of herself as their Angel of Death, raining fire and brimstone down on the Alliance troops. River had snatched the term from Jayne's thoughts when the blast doors had opened so long ago in Mr. Universe's complex.

It was part of what had taken her to him. She wasn't a little girl to him. She wasn't his _mei-mei_ or something fragile to be protected. She was dangerous and volatile and everything that Simon and Kaylee and to an extent, the Captain, refused to see.

He saw what she was and he could appreciate it.

River's shoulders went rigid as the dashboard lit up and the proximity alarms began to blare. Her fingertips flew over the controls until she brought up the screen. The center blip, she knew, was Serenity. The surrounding blips were likely Alliance ships.

They fanned out as they came up behind her and a little blinking icon at the corner of the screen told her that they were hailing her.

"03-k64-Firefly, registered name _Serenity_. You are hereby bound by law to stand down and prepare to be boarded."

River's small hands encircled the controls again and she fleetingly wished Kaylee were in the engine room to give her full burn. But, she wasn't, and River would have to do her best.

It wasn't going well.

Jayne could tell that much from where he was hunkered down in the trench. Every few seconds clumps of dirt would rain into the trench and he'd have to wipe it out of his eyes and spit it out of his mouth.

Mal had taken off down the trench to man the M30 the minute the Alliance skiffs had shown up. They were raining bullets down on them and the dead were already rivaling the last two battles put together.

He hefted Vera up on the shoulder that Simon hadn't pulled lead out of just the day before and climbed up on the fire step. He sighted the Alliance purple-belly manning their machine gun and squeezed off a few quick rounds. The bullets hit their target and the man crumpled to the ground.

Another quickly took his place, stepping over the body with out so much as a second glance.

Jayne sighted this one too and brought him down just as quickly as he had the first. Didn't matter much though. They'd keep coming just as fast as he could shoot them. There could be a pile of bodies ten feet deep and they wouldn't even falter.

He wondered briefly what it was about war that made otherwise decent men brutal.

Overhead there was a low rumble and then the earth shuddered as one of the skiffs fell to the ground. Pieces of shrapnel flew through the air, just as dangerous as bullets.

This was all going wrong.

The Alliance troops had been there, lying in wait. They'd claimed the higher ground and forced the Independents to dig their trenches in the lowlands. They hadn't even gotten four feet in when they hit water and there was only so much the duck boards could do to keep a man dry.

His pants were soaked with mud up to the knee and if this lasted for more than a day, they'd be lucky if all they ended up with was trench foot.

They'd dropped Simon, Kaylee and 'Nara off on one of Beylix's moons. They were safe, tucked away in one of the colonies up there so that Simon and 'Nara could take care of the wounded and Kaylee could get to work on some of their skiffs that needed fixing.

And bury the dead.

Every colony they stopped on became a make shift burial ground for the soldiers who'd died in the last battle. They'd buried 56 people that morning and another 80 lay waiting in the schoolhouse that had been turned into a morgue after they'd run out of other places to store the dead.

Serenity was turning into a gorram hearse.

His eyes flicked upwards, even though he knew that was stupid. Wasn't like he'd be able to see her up there, circling around just outside of atmosphere.

Ready when they needed her.

And gorram if they didn't need her.

But there was no way that Mal would call for Serenity with those jeeps still shooting anything in brown. Serenity was powerful and quick, but they were smaller and faster. They would fly circles around River and shoot Serenity out of the sky the second she broke atmo.

Truth be told, Jayne was glad that the girl was up there and not down in the trenches or flying around over their heads.

He didn't know which way was up anymore when the girl was around.

She spun him around something fierce.

Wasn't right.

Overhead, there was a shrill squeal and another one of the Alliance skiffs fell out of the sky. Jayne dropped down to his belly to avoid the shrapnel. The ground shook under him, rumbling against his chest. When he pulled himself to his feet, he was covered neck to toe in mud and dirty water.

He was beginning to think that no amount of water and soap was going to get him clean again if he made it back to Serenity.

The Alliance skiffs seemed to never stop.

It felt like every time that Mal shot one of them out of the sky, two more took their place. He sighted another skiff on the gun's radar and fired off a few rounds. His bones shook with the backfire and his teeth rattled against each other.

Every advance they attempted to make, the Alliance was right there, cutting them down at the knees. He'd sent a battalion around behind the Alliance troops. The idea was that they would come up over the hill behind the Alliance's trenches and it'd be like shooting fish in a barrel.

Should have been like shooting fish in a barrel anyways. Except that the Alliance troops had been waiting for them at the top of the hill as they'd come up. Out of those men only 2 had come back, running like they had the devil himself at their heels.

Every move they made, the Alliance seemed to know about it even before they did. Every move was countered and thwarted. It was starting to look like suicide to even leave the trenches.

And it was lending credibility to River's theory that they had readers over there, anticipating every strategy he came up with.

They'd already retreated at least 30 yards from where they'd started and there were boys back there right now digging them even more trenches in case they had to fall back even farther. And if things kept going this way, they were going to lose Beylix.

Gorram, but that would be a big hit to their troops. If they couldn't get food and supplies, their numbers would fall drastically. He'd seen it at Serenity Valley, people starving to death or getting sick and dying off from disease. Entire troops were running out of ammo and those as still had it were eating their own guns to stop their bellies from growling.

Overhead, there was a low rumbling. Almost like thunder, but there weren't a cloud in the sky and for that Mal was thankful. The last thing they needed was rain making everything muddy and filling up the trenches with water.

Mal dropped down, his shoulders sore from bracing up the anti-aircraft gun, and fished around in his pocket for the comlink.

"You doin' alright up there, Lil Albatross?"

Silence.

The crackle of static was starting to make him uneasy. "River, you got exactly three seconds to answer me 'cause this eerie silence is getting on my last nerve."

There was more static and a loud rumbling noise overhead. Mal shielded his eyes and cursed loudly. Serenity was burning through atmo and plunging straight for the ground, smoke streaming out behind her and three Alliance cruisers right behind her.


	6. PART V

**A/N:** Muchos thanks to my betas, Chicafrom3 and April Nicole. Well, y'know, if I'd actually waited for them to send it back to me. I got impatient, haha. But when they get it back to me, I'll fix whatever mistakes they catch. Until then, all the fuck ups are mine.

------------------------------- 

"_Gan ni niang_," Jayne hissed, watching Serenity's nose dive down towards the earth. Serenity spiraled a few times, smoke rising out from behind her in a thick black cloud. The girl was two seconds away from getting intimate with the ground.

One of the Alliance cruisers behind her dropped out of the sky and another took it's place. Jayne cursed, no matter how many of them you shot down, they just kept coming, one after the other and Serenity was closing in on the ground fast. The ship began to groan and she was shaking so badly that for a moment, Jayne wondered if she'd shake herself into pieces. The grinding got louder the closer the ship got to the ground and a thirty yards before she hit earth, Serenity's nose started pulling up.

Jayne muttered curses between his teeth as he hefted up Vera on his shoulder. Not even his best girl could breach metal, but the Alliance ships had gotten close while they chased after River. They were close enough that if he squinted and turned his head just right, he could see the bastards in their cockpits, looking smug.

Vera might not be able to breach hulls but she could breach glass just fine.

He sighted the one closest to Serenity and tried to get a lock on the target but the way the ships were veering around each other, it was almost impossible.

"Snipers," Jayne bellowed, looking around him at the boys hunkered down in the trenches with him, watching the dog fight over their head. "I need all of you as can shootin' those jeeps down. Don't be wastin' your ammo. Shoot 'em if you got a decent lock on the guy flyin' that pile of _go se_. Ain't gonna do us no good to shoot at the ship itself."

The boys stared up at him with big eyes and Jayne muttered another curse. "You all deaf and dumb? I said _git_."

Finally, just when he thought he might have to drag them all to their feet himself, they scrambled up on the fire step, guns in hand and started sighting the Alliance cruisers. Jayne crawled up over the sandbags that protected the trenches and darted into the cover of a nearby tree, already blown in half from the fighting earlier. The jagged edges stretched up a few feet over his head if he bent down far enough.

It was decent cover, but he needed to get closer to the Alliance trenches if he was gonna lay down some cover so the boys shooting at the Alliance ships wouldn't get their heads blown clean off their shoulders.

Dropping down to his elbows and knees, Jayne wriggled along the ground until he could drop down into a nearby missile crater as a bullet whizzed past his left shoulder. He braced Vera on the edge of the crater and stood up just far enough so he could see what he was shooting at with out making himself too big of a target.

Overhead, Serenity had just barely pulled herself out of her nosedive, but she was limping along at half her regular speed and still taking hits. Jayne didn't like thinking about the crazy girl, getting knocked around the cockpit and shot at. He didn't really care to examine exactly why he didn't like thinking on that though.

He squeezed off a few rounds, watching the purple-bellies stupid enough to be coming over the side of the trenches fall to the ground, dead or dying.

------------------------------- 

Two more Alliance skiffs fell to the ground and another took direct hit. It was still flying but it dropped back enough to give River time to maneuver the ship around it.

She needed to head back for atmo, but she wasn't sure if Serenity would make it through with out shaking herself apart. The ship had taken too many direct hits to her backside and underbelly and the alarms were sounding and buzzing and ringing so loudly that she could barely think.

Wash's little plastic dinosaurs that she had insisted stay in their places on the console were all over the place now, one of them, the T-Rex she thinks, is under her foot.

She's good enough at flying. Mal says she's gorram amazing. But she knows that she'll never really measure up to Wash. She quantifies flying, turns it into a mathematical equation, something easier for her to understand. But Wash flew like he breathed, with grace and ease. She'd seen him worry and panic countless times, but when he flew, he was calm. When he flew, he knew exactly what to do. River wished that she knew exactly what to do, but she didn't. She could calculate the angles and distances of the Alliance ships. She could quantify them to her hearts content but she had no idea how to shake them. Wash would have known.

Serenity groaned again as she turned the ship towards the Independent trenches. Wash would lead them to over to Mal and the troops, she thought. He would lead them to where it would be easier for the snipers and the anti-aircraft gun to get a good lock on them. Gently, River urged Serenity forward, her thumb lovingly rubbing over Serenity's controls. With out love, she'd fall right out of the sky, River remembered.

Two more Alliance skiffs crashed down into the earth behind her as she eased Serenity down so low to the ground that her belly was almost rubbing the dirt as she they hurtled through the air.

"Please," River said quietly. "I need you to please not toss me out of the sky, Serenity."

------------------------------- 

Jayne dropped down to his stomach when Serenity flew overhead, so low that if he'd been standing up he wouldn't have had much of a head left on his shoulders.

The girl was flying too low, she was about three seconds away from scraping Serenity's belly open on some trees or rock outcroppings. She made a wide, lazy circle and brought the ships back around above the Independent's trenches. The snipers and Mal on the M30 brought down two more skiffs, the ground shaking and trembling when they fell. The rest of them got smart, they circled around their own trenches and came back around in front of Serenity.

Jayne clenched his teeth as River barely out-maneuvered the ships and started trying to gain some altitude. A movement to Jayne's left caught his attention and he turned and shot at the source of the movement. Two Alliance soldiers stumbled out from behind a group of massacred tree stumps and fell to the ground hard.

"Fall back!" Mal was yelling somewhere off to Jayne's left. "All troops, fall back!"

This wasn't going well, but it didn't take a rutting genius to figure that out.Jayne glanced back at the trenches, he couldn't see down inside of them, but he knew that all their boys were gathering up what they could and hightailing it through the trenches. They were already pushed back almost to Beylix's one ocean. Any farther and they'd be trying to shoot from underwater.

They were running out of ground to hold.

Jayne couldn't see Serenity anymore. He assumed the girl had gotten her up and over the hills behind where the purple-bellies had dug in. Wherever she was, the remaining skiffs had all followed her.

------------------------------- 

"We ain't got no more ground to hold, Colonel!"

Mal gritted his teeth, his hand clenched too tight on the butt of his gun. He knew this wasn't exactly going according to plan but he didn't need some snot-nosed Corporal whining about it either.

"I know that, Donald," he ground out, surveying what was left of his troops and their supplies and-- "Where the gorram hell is Jayne?"

Mal cursed loudly under his breath, he didn't have time to look after this bunch of wet-behind the ears boys, his pilot _and_ his mercenary. And none of 'em could seem to stay where he told 'em too.

Jayne was covered from head to toe in mud and dirt when he rounded the corner and Mal barely recognized him. "We got our backs to the water," Jayne gritted out after he'd limped up to the rest of the platoon. "And we got 'bout half the men we started out with."

Less than half. They'd sent half the boys around to come up over the mountain to drop in and surprise the Alliance troops. Unfortunately, the purple-bellies had been waiting for them. It was like they knew from the get-go what they were planning.

Mal was starting to suspect that little River was right. They had gorram government-made Readers over there. It would explain why every strategy they'd been trying the last month and a half was failing before it had even gotten a start.

"They got readers," he mumbled. "Girl was right, they got Readers over there."

"_Wa cao!_" Jayne exclaimed. "We don't got a ruttin' chance."

Mal set down heavily on the fire step and rubbed one dirt-caked hand down his face. Jayne, for once, was right. They didn't have a chance. Every step of ground they took earned them two steps back because the Alliance troops were right there waiting for them.

They were losing Beylix just like they'd lost almost every scrap of land they'd fought for in the last month.

Mal sighed. "Get the commander on the line," he barked. "Tell 'em we're pullin' out. Tell 'em... tell 'em we're surrendering Beylix."

------------------------------- 

Kaylee sighed, "They did a number on you, didn't they old girl?"

She absently stroked a hand down Serenity's hull, inspecting the damage to the plating and calculating costs of new parts in her head. There was a big old gash in her underbelly, she was going to need that repaired if she was gonna get up in the air any time soon.

"How is she?" River asked from behind her, her voice soft and nervous.

Kaylee pasted a warm smile on her face before she turned around, it was getting harder and harder for her to smile these days but she didn't have to be a mind-reader to know that River felt bad every time she brought Serenity back to her all scraped up.

"She's gonna be just fine," Kaylee said, turning back to the ship and gesturing, "Just a few little tweaks and some new paint and she'll be good as new."

"I didn't... I didn't hurt her?" River asked, nervously twisting her hands.

"Nah, she's gonna be just fine. She knows ya didn't mean 'er no harm, River."

River nodded, but her eyes didn't look certain. Every time she slipped into Serenity's pilot seat, she was certain the ship would toss her out of the sky because she couldn't love her like Wash had. Mal had said that love kept the boat flying, but no one could love Serenity like Wash had and River was always afraid that Serenity would be angry with her for trying.

"Take care of Simon," River mumbled softly, "Like you take care of Serenity."

"What, sweetie?" Kaylee's voice was muffled by Serenity's belly. She's crawled up under the boat to get a better look at the twisted, broken metal panels.

"Nothing," River said quickly. She tucked her chin against her chest and took long strides until she reached the cargo bay where Mal and Jayne were stacking up bodies. They buried the ones who were too mangled to identify on Beylix and the ones that they could got stacked like planks in the cargo bay to be taken home or wherever they could bury them in proper graves.

"Captain," River said softly.

"I done told you no, little witch." His voice was dark and he didn't turn around. His shoulders hunched as he finished securing the bodies so that they didn't slide all over the ship during take offs and landings. He was sprinkling saw dust all over them to stop the smell when they started to rot.

"Everyone is dying," she said softly. "I can help, I want to help."

"You help me by flying us where we need to go and not crashin' my boat," Mal instructed. He turned around and his mouth was set in a grim line. "Your brother's told us I don't know how many times what they did to you in that place. That really something you wanna go back to?"

When River didn't answer, he pressed on, "Would think that's the last place you wanna go back to, Lil' Albatross."

"It is," River said softly, dogging his steps as he left the bay and headed for the mess. "But we'll die, gasping for breath and coughing up pieces of lung and--"

"Really not needin' to hear this right now, Lil' Witch."

"Please, Captain," River pleaded. "Please. You'll die. Jayne will die. Kaylee will die. I will die. _Inara_ will die."

Mal froze, his back went rigid but he refused to turn around and look her in the eye. River carefully slipped around him, drawing herself up in front of him.

"The math has been checked, everything is quantified. Every possible angle, every possible outcome. Please, Captain. This is the only way to achieve the optimal outcome."

Mal's eyes were hard and his mouth drawn into a thin line. "Gonna do this whether I give you the ok or not, ain't ya?"

"This girl is very stubborn, Captain," River said, nodding grimly.

Mal leaned heavily on the metal railing, looking down on the cargo bay. The remaining soldiers were bunked up, the wounded fading in and out of consciousness and half of them would probably die before the night was over even though Simon had done his best to patch them all back together. He had a cargo bay full of dead and dying boys who were barely old enough to take their first sip of whiskey on civilized planets and a platoon to feed and weapon up when their main source of supplies had just been closed off.

"You find a way to stay in contact at all times." Mal's voice was hard and terse. River could tell that it was killing him to concede but he was seeing things for what they were. They were fighting a losing battle and he wasn't about to fail twice in one lifetime.

"You'll carry a com, I don't care how you smuggle it in with you, but you ain't goin' unless you can promise me you can come up with some way to stay in constant contact with this boat. We lose contact with you and we're coming to get you. They start cuttin' on you again, we're comin' to get you, _dong ma_?"

River nodded, her heart pounding. She hadn't really started thinking about the enormity of her actions until the Captain had given in. She sometimes still had dreams about being back in the Blue Room, she still woke up sobbing into her pillow so that she didn't wake anyone up. And now she was voluntarily offering herself up for capture.

"It will have to be Jayne," she said grimly. "He will have to be the one to give her up. He has tried once before, they think they have the measure of the man."

Mal nodded. The girl had a point. He'd expected it to be him who did the turning over but he was high profile, even in Alliance circles. They knew what he'd done on Miranda and why. Him turning the girl in was just too unbelievable. Jayne, on the other hand... well, he was a man who went where the money was good. And when it came to the bounty on that girl's head, the money was better than good, it was gorram mind blowing.

"You're gonna have to be the one to talk to him, Lil' Witch," Mal said, hooking his fingers through his belt loops as the two of them turned their backs on the stacks of bodies. "I don't know what's goin' on with the two of ya and I ain't sure I wanna know, but he ain't gonna take to this plan of yours."

River's fingers clenched and unclenched into fists. He was right, if Jayne were to be brought into this plan, it would have be her doing and not Mal's. She nodded, worrying her lower lip with her teeth. "She will speak with Jayne," River said finally, "She'll make him see."

------------------------------- 

"Ain't doin' it."

"What?" the girl demanded, her voice rising in pitch. "Why?" River's little hands were clenched up into knots and her eyes were wide, like she'd never expected him to say no and she didn't quite comprehend that he had.

Jayne didn't look up from the bowl of rice in front of him. "Said no, meant no."

"That is not a suitable _reason_," River insisted. "That is just a re-telling of the previous point!"

Jayne kept his eyes down on his bowl. The girl had gone and asked too much from him this time. Something that he weren't willing to give. He wasn't going to turn her in, not again. Not after... everything.

River snorted. "She would expect you would turn her in more readily after _everything_."

Jayne's head jerked up a fraction of an inch. "What'd I tell you about that?" he demanded roughly.

River paused in her indignation, "Which _that_?" she asked, head tilting to the side. He'd told her more than once to quit referring to herself in the third person, but he'd also told her to stop poking around in his mind more times than she could count.

"What?" Jayne asked, raising his head finally. His face was twisted up in confusion.

"Which _that_." River repeated. "You said: What'd I tell you about that?" she told him in a perfect imitation of his own voice. "But you did not specify which _that_. Jayne does not like it when the girl speaks in the third person limited. He also does not like it when the girl 'pokes 'round in his head.'" Again, she imitated him perfectly. "She is unsure as to which _that_ you were referring."

The confusion on Jayne's face didn't abate, if anything, he looked _more_ confused. "Uhh, both of 'em, I guess."

River gave a little nod, as though that were acceptable to her. "All right."

A pause. "Will you please just--"

"Still ain't doin' it."

"_Why_!" River demanded, her voice rose in pitch with every word. "She has thought this through. She has... she has done the math. I have done the math and this is the only way to reach an optimal outcome!"

"Throwing you back in that place to get your head all cut on is your plan?" Jayne demanded, finally putting down the chopsticks he had been using to shovel rice into his mouth. "I'm startin' to think _Mal_ has better plans than your crazy ass."

"I need to be on the inside. I can gather information, I can _do_ something."

Jayne stood, crossing the floor to the sink in a few, big strides. "Already are doin' something, ain'tcha? You're flyin' this piece of _go se_."

"She's not--"

"I know, I know," he grumbled. "She ain't _go se_. I got Kaylee defendin' this hunk'a metal to me every five seconds, don't need you doin' it to. She keeps me in the sky and not dead and that's good 'nuff for me."

He tried to skirt past the girl, but she insinuated herself in front of him, her thin arms crossed over her chest. "Jayne."

"Girl."

"She has got a name," River replied indignantly. She had hoped this would be easier but with Jayne, everything had to be done the hard way or not at all.

"I know."

River sighed with exasperation. "Please. It has to be you. No one else can do it."

Jayne's face went hard and his voice was nothing more than a growl when he spoke. "Said that once before and you didn't mean it."

"She did mean it," River protested, grabbing at his arm even as he tried to brush past her. "She meant what she said and she said what she meant. Did what she wanted with whom she wanted. No lies, no untruths."

Jayne sighed. "You're tellin' an untruth right now, girl. Didn't mean nothin' to you when you was doin' it. Maybe you're thinkin' a mite different now or maybe it's just cause you need somethin' from me, but it didn't mean a damn thing to you."

He pressed his mouth into a tight line and pushed past her. River wavered on her feet before getting her balance again. She muttered a string of Chinese curses under her breath. "You are a stupid man, Jayne Cobb."

"_I'm_ a stupid man?" Jayne demanded, whirling back around to face her. River blinked up at him and the anger slipped off of his face. "Reckon' yer right." He paused and refused to meet her eyes as he pushed past her. "And I still ain't doin' it.


	7. PART VI

**A/N:** This is woefully unbeta-ed because both of my betas are too busy for me. It makes my face sad. Anyways, the italics are memories, in case that was unclear. Yadda, yadda, yadda. The usual. Concrit, as always, is welcome. Flames are giggled at and the flamers pitied.

------------------------------------------

"Jayne!"

River pounded weakly at the hatch to his bunk. It had been over an hour since he'd disappeared down there and her hands were sore from knocking. She was tired and all she wanted to do was drop down onto the floor, curl up and sleep.

But she couldn't, because first she had to convince Jayne to turn her in.

"Jayne Cobb, open this door or she will have to break it down!" River insisted. Jayne had used that line on her once, when she'd locked herself in one of the spare bunks and refused to come out. He'd followed through with it too, much to the Captain's dismay. River's eyes narrowed when she heard a snort from behind the door.

"Break it down?" he asked, and she could practically _hear_ him smirking. "Don't see that happenin', little girl. Little thing like you? Nawww."

And now he was mocking her. Not only was he ruining her plan, but now he was mocking her. River was practically shaking in anger. And with the anger came the tears. Her shoulders started it, they began shaking and it slowly worked it's way down her body until it was a full blown shudder.

She felt so helpless, standing outside of his door and feebly pleading with him. She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her fist into her mouth so that he wouldn't know that her frustration with him had reduced her to tears. Inside his bunk, Jayne could hear the soft huff of her irregular breathing. The girl was crying; it knotted up his belly and his skin flushed with shame. Mumbling an oath under his breath, he unlocked the door.

River looked up when the hatch scraped open, metal on metal. "Well?" Jayne asked, trying to give off an air of indifference. "You gonna stay up there and blubber or you gonna come down here?"

The girl slipped past him like a ghost, winding down the ladder. She dropped onto the metal floor with a soft thud and stared up at him with those big eyes of hers.

"Quit your cryin'," Jayne growled. He grabbed her chin in his hand and wiped the dampness off of her cheeks with the pad of his thumb.

"S-sorry," River muttered. Her cheeks flamed with embarrassment. She wasn't a child, she wasn't supposed to burst into tears whenever something didn't go her way. She'd come here to argue her point home, to make Jayne see why he had to follow along with her plan. Instead, she'd dissolved into tears and he would never take her seriously.

"I ain't doin' it, girl," he repeated. "I ain't turnin' you in and all the cryin' in the world ain't gonna change that."

"Why!" River demanded desperately. "It's a valid plan. A _good_ plan."

"Ain't." Jayne replied, turning his back on her. He took one of his smaller guns from the rack behind his bed and sat down heavily on the thin mattress. He needed the comfort of taking apart and cleaning one of his guns if he was going to be this close to the girl.

"Is too," River insisted. "You do not understand. She has seen everything, thought everything through. We will all die unless I am there. If you do not turn me back in, I cannot get the information to the Captain that will win this. I can win this."

"Sounds like ya already know whatcha need to know," Jayne pointed out, not looking up from Betty. "Could just tell him now."

"She_ doesn't _know," River insisted. "But she _will!_ She must, or everyone will die. We will lose the war."

Jayne didn't answer her. He bent farther towards his work, his big fingers easing the gun apart. River fell quiet, watching him easily break Betty apart. With out thinking, she grabbed the silver tin of polish from the top of the tiny chest of drawer's that occasionally housed Jayne's clothes when he didn't just throw them in a heap on the floor. She offered it to him and he took it with out looking up. She held out the piece of fleece that he kept for oiling up his guns and he accepted that too, going to work on the barrel and making it glisten. River perched at his feet, watching him closely. It almost felt like it had months ago.

After Miranda, out and out hatred had become grudging respect. Jayne had to admire any person-- man, woman or girl-- who could bring down a whole passel of Reavers like the crazy girl had. And if he wanted to be a hundred percent truthful, he couldn't lie that seeing her like that, covered from head to toe in blood, her lithe body tensed and ready to strike, hadn't turned him on just a little bit.

The girl had started dogging his steps once everything had gotten as normal as they were gonna get with Wash and the Preacher gone. Even more when Mal started letting her fly the boat and tag along on jobs. She'd begged him to spar with her or teach her to shoot. He'd told her no. Just because he didn't out right hate her didn't mean he wanted to go out of his way to spend time with the girl.

He'd given in though, once the girl started taking hits just like the rest of them. He still remembers the first time she'd gotten shot. She'd gritted her teeth and tried to keep stoic like she'd seen him or Mal do when they'd taken a bullet. But Jayne had seen the tears brimming up in her eyes while he carried her back to the mule.

Once she'd healed up and Simon had finally let her out of the infirmary after a couple months of fussing over her, Jayne had tossed a gun in her lap one night while they were planet side. "Meet me outside, girl." He'd taught her precision shooting the first night. Simon hadn't been lying about the girl's aptitude for everything. She'd been a quick study and they'd moved on quickly to knife fighting and hand to hand. She was a natural, graceful and lithe; she moved with an ease that Jayne had never been able to coax out of his large body. It'd taken a couple of months to hone all that Alliance planted Kung Fu mumbo-jumbo and turn her into something they could use on jobs.

They'd sit in the mess or the cargo bay every evening and River would help him clean his girls up nice. She wasn't half bad to talk to once you got past all the double meanings. It was like the girl talked in code. And she had always anticipated his needs before he'd even had a chance to vocalize them. She'd appear with a glass of water, a tin of gun oil or one of his girls that needed cleaning up.

Of course, things hadn't stayed like that. It was the way of things, Jayne figured. Just when everything got fixed up nice, the 'Verse found a way to send it crashing down on them. The girl had gone and kissed him. Or, at least, that's what he told himself happened. The truth was, Jayne didn't remember which way it had happen. He couldn't remember if he'd kissed the girl first or if it had been her pressing her eager mouth against his own.

Maybe it had been a mutual thing.

It took Jayne a moment to realize that Betty was polished up and reassembled in his big palms. He shook his head and glanced down at the girl. River's eyes were wide and curious and it didn't take a genius to figure out she'd been right there with him while he'd been sifting through those memories.

"What'd I tell you about that?" he growled. "My head ain't no place for your head to be."

"She kissed Jayne first," River pointed out. "His memories are correct."

"You just ain't gonna listen to a word I say, are ya?" he grumbled, tucking Betty back into her place. His hands hesitated over the gun rack. He wanted to pull another one down and get to work cleaning her up nice, but he'd given the rest of them a wipe down earlier and they were all gleaming like the night sky.

"Go get me yer gun," he instructed. He figured if the girl was gonna hang around, he might as well do something useful and show the girl how to take proper care of her piece.

River hesitated. "Will you lock her out?"

Jayne gave the girl a look, "Baby doll, if I wanted you out, you'd be out. But yer still in, ain'tcha? So go get me yer gun."

The girl cast him one last plaintive look with those eyes of hers and disappeared up the ladder. And if he said he wasn't watching her ass as she went he'd be lying.

_So, the girl had kissed him first. Her tiny little hands grabbing handfuls of his t-shirt and pulling him down to her. It'd been her birthday, she was turning eighteen and not even her brother had remembered. She didn't blame them though. Everyone was so consumed in their own grief and she'd been doing her best to lay low so that she wouldn't feel theirs as well as her own. Jayne had found her wedged into one of her hiding places in the cargo bay. He knew them all by heart, by then. _

"_Get your skinny ass outta there," he'd growled, not unkindly. "I ain't comin' in there after you." _

"_Go away." Her voice had been tiny and muffled and he knew that she was having herself a good sulk over being forgotten about. _

"_Fine," he'd said, dangling the chocolate bar just inside her hidey hole. "But if I go 'way, you don't get this." _

_The girl had been out in a second, just as he'd known she would. She was a female after all and there wasn't anything you couldn't get a woman to do if you had enough chocolate. Her eyes had gone big and glassy and that was when he'd known he was done for. He was a sucker for the crazy girl's eyes. _

"_Jayne remembered the girl's birthday?" she'd asked, her voice threatening to break at any second. He'd grunted at her and shoved the candy into her hands. _

"_Ain't like you ain't been yammerin' on 'bout it for the last week," he'd grumbled. And then her tiny little mouth had been pressing against his and his hands had been places they really shouldn't have been and all of it was over a candy bar. _

"_She's eighteen," River had mumbled against his mouth when he'd tried to pull away from her. "She's eighteen and she has never had a proper kiss." _

"_Still ain't," Jayne had told her. Then he had tangled up his hand in the hair at the back of her head and drew her into him. He didn't kiss on the mouth but that didn't mean he'd forgotten how and that fumbling mess between him and the girl hadn't been a proper kiss. Something about those eyes and the way her belly was rubbing up against his was making him think all kinds of crazy thoughts, like giving the girl her first proper kiss. _

"_But..." River had mumbled, looking confused. "There was the appropriate amount of skin to skin contact. All rituals were observed--" _

_Jayne mashed his lips against hers, cutting off her crazy girl babbling. She stood stock still for a second but when he gently coaxed her mouth open with his tongue, her lips began to work against his. He was panting and her lips were swollen by the time he pulled back. "That..." he said matter-of-fact, "was a proper kiss."_

The hatch scraped open, metal on metal, and River dropped down into his bunk, her gun held carefully in one hand. She offered it to Jayne, handle first and he took it, running his thumb over the barrel. "Sit down and I'll teach ya how to clean her up."

"Him," River corrected. "His name is Lloyd."

Jayne made a face. "Guns ain't male, Crazy girl," he told her, like she should have already known.

"Says who?" River countered.

"Says me."

River snorted. "You do not count." The minute she said it, she realized that she had said something wrong. Jayne's mouth set in a firm line and his shoulders stiffened.

"Reckon yer right," he told her. "But I ain't gonna be around forever to clean up your gun for ya so you best pay attention and learn it the first time." The hardness had crept back into his voice. He was closing himself off to her again, one little piece at a time.

River watched attentively as Jayne showed her out to take Lloyd apart and oil up his insides, clean out the residue and put him back together. She didn't tell him that she'd known how to do this since the first or maybe second time she'd watched him cleaning his own guns. She feigned ignorance because her only contact with Jayne lately seemed to come when he was weaponing her up or cleaning Lloyd for her. She missed sitting by his feet and babbling at him for hours while he cleaned his girls.

_The girl had been eager and willing, her little body pressed against his obscenely. It wasn't the first time Jayne had noticed how tiny River was. It made him feel all kinds of protective towards her, his big work-rough hands could almost circle her whole waist. They had stumbled back into Jayne's bunk, his hands grabbing at the backs of her thighs and trying to pull her up into his arms. This was wrong and he knew. It was wrong in so many different ways but gorram if he could stop. It was wrong because he was old enough to be her pa. It was wrong because the girl's first time shouldn't have been with some hun dan mercenary. It should have been with some fancy Core boy who could buy her shiny trinkets and silk sheets and pretty dresses. Someone who wasn't Jayne, half-carrying, half-dragging the girl down into his dark, messy bunk and laying her down on the thin mattress. _

_He pressed against her, hips and legs and chest pinning her down while his fingers worked up her thighs and under the elastic of her panties. River whimpered against his mouth and her hips shifted involuntarily. She hooked her ankles around his calves and rubbed her belly against him urgently. Ai ya, but the girl was trying to kill him._

_This-- this was what Jayne Cobb did best. This was what he was-- ruttin' and drinkin' and killin'. He should have had the girl's legs thrown over his shoulders and his mouth buried between her thighs by now. He should have had her squealing and writhing underneath him by now. But he didn't, because there was this nagging little voice that sounded too much like the Preacher in the back of his head telling him that this wasn't right. _

_Sighing, Jayne pulled away and struggled to untangle himself from River's arms and legs. _

"_Did she do something wrong?" River asked, her eyes wide. Her skin was flushed with arousal and her lips were swollen and red. Her eyes darted up to the pictures of the buxom blonde women pinned up over his bunk and glanced down at her own, less endowed body and childish sun dress and felt ashamed. _

"_Didn't do nuthin' wrong," Jayne muttered. "Now git up on outta here for I do somethin' we're both gonna regret." _

_The girl stared at him, bewildered, and Jayne wondered when he'd grown a conscience. He was fairly certain that it was a recent development and not one he particularly liked either. River had tugged at him, "Not something to regret," she'd insisted, kissing around his mouth in a way that was making his stomach clench up almost painfully. "She wants this. Wants to know what it is like." _

_Jayne pinned her down by her wrists, for no other reason than to stop her from kissing and licking at his neck like she'd been doing. "I ain't gonna tell you again girl, git." _

_Those big brown eyes stared into his and River nodded slowly. "All right. The girl will leave. You aren't ready." _

_Jayne shook his head, "Ain't gonna do this now, ain't gonna do it ever. You're crazy." _

"_And you're stupid," River countered, a bitter edge creeping into her voice. _

_Jayne pressed her wrists into the mattress a little harder. "Ain't stupid." _

_The girl's eyes flashed. "Ain't crazy." _

_He'd kissed her again and told himself that it was just to shut her up so that no one heard her. Her voice had been rising in pitch and the last thing he needed was someone walking in on this-- whatever this was. The truth was, he kissed her because that defiant set in her jaw and her big brown eyes spitting fire at him made his skin feel tight and hot. _

_Jayne finally pushed himself off of her, stumbling to his feet. "I said git out of here, girl. And I meant it." _

_River curled in on herself, her dress still hitched up around her thighs. Her face was twisted up in confusion and she looked about ready to cry, which was the last thing that Jayne wanted to happen. She climbed to her feet and yanked her skirt down, her small hands clenching tightly around the rungs of the ladder as she climbed up towards the hatch. _

"_River." It was soft and she barely noticed it, except that it was her name and Jayne never called her by her name. "C'mere, girl," he said when she twisted her neck to look at him. _

_River gracefully dropped back down, her bare feet shuffling on the metal floor as she slid closer to him, her head down and her hands were worrying themselves at her stomach. Jayne reached out gently and straightened up her dress which had gotten all turned around and twisted up around her body. She stood quietly while he combed her hair back into place with his fingertips. Jayne cupped her chin in one big palm and tilted her face up so that he could get a better look at her, one thumb swiping across her puffed up lips. He pressed a soft kiss against her mouth and then another on the top of her head. _

"_Alright," he said, giving her a gentle push in the direction of the ladder. "Git on to bed and don't let that brother of yours see ya." _

_The girl had climbed back up the ladder, a little less beaten-dog than before. "_Ai ya_," Jayne muttered when she closed the hatch door with a soft grinding of metal. Jayne Cobb was very much out of his element and he couldn't help but feel like he'd just started something with the girl that maybe he hadn't wanted to start. And damn, but he had picked a horrible time to go all noble. _

"Here," Jayne grunted, shoving the gun back into River's hands. "You get all that, girl?"

River nodded quietly. She pressed her lips tightly closed, it seemed as though every time she spoke, she said something that upset Jayne and he got tense and quiet again. Sometimes, she wished he had never thought to buy her a birthday present. Then everything would go back to the way it had been. The not-so-malicious-anymore teasing and her covert attentiveness when he lifted weights in the cargo bay.

Mostly, she just blamed herself. She should have known before she kissed him that she would never hold Jayne Cobb's attention. He bedded a new whore on every planet they stopped off on. Sometimes two or three new whores. He had pictures of extremely well endowed women up on the bulkhead in his bunk. He was used to something better than a crazy, scrawny little girl with small breasts and hips and tangled up hair.

_She'd only wanted some tea. _

_Simon was holed up in Kaylee's bunk and River had been steering clear all morning because the last thing she wanted was to pick up on some stray feelings from Simon. Or worse, Kaylee. So she'd kept her distance, mostly playing jacks in the cargo bay. But she'd wanted tea, so she'd skirted around Kaylee's bunk, desperately ignoring the emotions that thrummed through her body whenever she got too close and half-walked, half-danced to the mess. Mal and Jayne inside, talking about the run they'd gotten back from not fifteen minutes ago. She hadn't been allowed to go on this job. They were on a planet with a lot of military presence and while she was no longer a fugitive, not everyone knew that or was inclined to care._

"_Hell, Mal, I didn't want what she was offering," Jayne muttered crudely. "I like 'em with a little somethin' to 'em, she's all bones." _

_River lurked outside the door to the mess hall. She'd spent the better part of the last week struggling to stay one step ahead of Jayne. Her ears burned and her cheeks flushed when she thought of the kiss and his hands sliding up her thighs back in his bunk. When she though about it, her stomach churned and she felt like she did when Simon messed up whatever combo of drugs he was giving her and she spent the day nauseous until they wore off. _

"_Didn't think you were one to turn down free sex, Jayne," Mal said. They were cleaning their guns at the big dinner table. That meant that there had been shooting done. Whenever Mal and Jayne sat down and cleaned their guns immediately after coming back from a job, someone had gotten shot. _

"_Hell, she weren't a bit of nothin'. And if she could tell a cock from a set of balls I'd be a monkey's uncle." _

_Both men laughed at that and River cringed. Were they talking about her? They had to be. What else could they be talking about. For a minute, she wanted to reach out and see what they were thinking. But she was too afraid of what she would find there. _

"_Warm, wet and willin' though. Ain't that your usual criteria?" Mal asked, and then "Pass me that rag." _

_There was shuffling inside the mess and River held her breath when it got quiet, afraid they would know that she was there, listening to them talk about her like a side of unappealing meat. _

"_Naw, I like 'em with a little more meat on their bones. And for all I know she coulda been a boy under that dress. Certainly didn't have no tits to speak of." _

_River closed her eyes tight, stumbling through Serenity's corridors. She angrily swiped at the tears pooling under her lashes. _

"_River, honey." River didn't stop when Inara reached out to her. She pushed past the companion and into the passenger showers, locking the door behind her with a satisfying click. Her sobs choked up in her throat and she turned on the water to mask them. _

_She should have known better than to kiss him. Should have known better than to think she could compare to the whores who knew what to do with their bodies to please Jayne. Or the women taped up over his bed, spread-legged fantasies that didn't resemble her in the least. They were full grown women and River was a barely eighteen little girl in Jayne's eyes. Scrawny and underdeveloped. He had probably only been humoring her, River though angrily, afraid of what she would do if he rejected her. Sliding down to the floor, River buried her wet face against her thighs._

_In the galley, Jayne laid Veronica to the side and gently pulled Lou out of her holster. "'Sides," he told Mal, easily pulling Lou apart so that he could slide the soft clothe into the nooks and crannies hiding residue. "She was only comin' onto me to distract me from those men lookin' to put a few more holes in us." _

_Mal laughed, "But she was puttin' on one helluva show. I thought for a minute there she was gonna pull her britches off right there in the middle of the bar." He passed the tin of gun oil to Jayne, barely looking up as Inara came in, a frown on her immaculate features. _

"_Was River in here?" she asked, moving to the cupboard to fix herself some tea. Usually she did that in her own shuttle, but after Miranda, she'd started spending more time with the crew in the galley and the common room. Mal figured she felt more like family now that she'd almost died for all of them. Going to battle with a person created a bond stronger than anything else, he figured. Him and Zoe were as close as two people could be and he didn't fool himself that things would likely be a mite different if they hadn't met in a trench. _

"_Didn't see her," Mal said, looking up from his gun now. "Why? Somethin' wrong?" _

_The companion stirred her tea, her brow knitted. "I don't know," she said finally, "She ran past me. She seemed upset." She sat down at the head of the table, a few chairs down from him and Jayne. _

"_Probably still upset that she didn't get to go on this run," he said dismissively. "Coulda used her though. Jayne here was getting' a little sidetracked and Zoe..." _

_Mal trailed off, glancing down the hallway as though speaking about his first mate would summon her. "Zoe's head ain't in it," he finished, trying to put it as tactfully as he could. _

_The first mate had been spending more and more time alone, down in the bunk she'd shared with Wash. She was practically sealing herself up in there. The only time she ventured out anymore was when they had a job to do or when it was meal time. Grief was taking it's toll on her and Mal was getting more than a little worried. _

"_Should I..." Inara hesitated. She was still feeling out her more permanent place among the crew. "Should I speak to her? I'm trained in... helping." _

_Mal raised an eyebrow. "I reckon the last thing Zoe needs is to get sexed up." _

_The companion shot him a scandalized look. "That was not what I was suggesting, Mal," she hissed, leaving her tea at the table as she stormed out of the room. _

"_Not a word," Mal warned, not even looking up at his smirking mercenary. _

"Your gun's cleaned up shiny," Jayne muttered, his hands restlessly clenching and unclenching against his thighs. "Git on out of here now, I ain't turnin' ya in and all yer doin' is annoyin' me, not changin' my mind 'bout nothin'."

"She will not leave until he consents," River said, her chin jutting out defiantly. _Ai ya_, but the girl could be stubborn as a mule when she wanted to be, Jayne thought. He was either going to have to lug Crazy out of his bunk or leave her there and ignore her.

"Go ask one'a them boys down in the cargo bay to turn ya in. I'm sure they'd be more'n willin'."

River's jaw stiffened and those big brown eyes spit fire at him. "Maybe she will," River countered. "She's positive that they would be _much_ more than willing."

"You do that then," he growled. "Use one of them 'stead of me. Think you've done enough of that."

Jayne was starting to wonder if they were still talking about turning her in or if they'd moved on to much more dangerous territory.

_He'd started to worry after a couple of days. The girl hadn't been dogging his footsteps lately and truth was, he kind of missed having her tagging along like an extra shadow. It was making him all manner of nervous though. Every time he turned a corner he half expected Mal or Simon to be waiting for him with a gun or a knife or a wrench or any other manner of unpleasantness. _

_Finally, he'd sought her out. Jayne told himself that he only wanted to make sure the girl hadn't run off crying rape or some other bit of nasty that was like to get him shot or on the wrong end of an airlock. But the truth was, if he would admit it, he was a little worried about her and maybe he missed her. Just a little bit. _

_She was down in the cargo bay, coloring in that sketch book of hers. "Hey, girl," he called out, when he got close enough. "We gotta have ourselves a talk." River hadn't looked up. "I'm talkin' at you, girl," he'd said, when he got closer. _

_When she looked up at him, her brown eyes didn't have that warm, open, sweetness that he'd gotten used to. "If Jayne would like to converse, he will have to try to be more polite to her," she responded, her voice cold. _

_Jayne's face contorted with annoyance and surprise. "Please?" he ground out through clenched teeth. He was already starting to suspect that this was not going to go well. He wasn't ready to admit that he was just a little bit hurt by the girl's coldness and the way she'd been avoiding him since she'd practically offered herself up to him in his bunk. This was all manner of confusing and Jayne was not a man who liked things complex. Complexities took up too much time that could be applied elsewhere-- like, ruttin', shootin' or drinkin'. _

_River folded her sketchbook closed. "What would he like to converse about?" she asked politely, but Jayne could hear the edge of ice in her voice. _

"_Well," he hovered uncomfortably. The girl was making no move to stand up so he finally knelt down to her level. "Why you been avoidin' me like I got the space measles, for one." _

"_Jayne does not like having the girl around to bother him. So the girl has made herself scarce, as per his wishes," River responded in that same cold, clipped voice she'd been using since the conversation had started. _

"_Look," he said, deciding to cut to the chase and ignore the little voice in his head screaming that he didn't mind having the girl around, actually. Not all the time, anyways. "You tell anybody about that--" Jayne lowered his voice considerably. "Kissin' business between us?" _

_River's eyes narrowed. "No, she has not divulged information of the kiss," her hands were clenching the edges of her sketchpad so tightly between her fingers that the pages were starting to bend. "It was just an experiment," she said, in that same, cold voice. "The girl only meant to find out what was so remarkable about kissing. Her results were inconclusive, she found nothing." _

_Jayne's stomach clenched hard at that and he fought to keep it from his face. "Right," he said and his voice sounded unattached, even to him. "Right. Just a 'speriment." He nodded once and stood up, turning his back on the girl as quick as he could. _

_Just an experiment. _

_When he slipped back down into his bunk, he'd punched the wall so hard that his knuckles split open. And then he'd lain face down on his bunk, eyes clenched shut, doing his best not to think too hard on the reason his heart felt like it'd fallen down to his feet. _

"She _will_ ask one of them," River muttered angrily, turning her back on Jayne and starting for the ladder. "Of course, someone will have to hurt her first. But she is sure she will have no problem finding some willing."

Jayne's head jerked up, his back rigid. "Whatcha mean _hurt_ you?" He was on his feet suddenly, two strides away from her and too close for comfort to crossing that breach.

"They will not believe that I would go willingly," River said matter-of-fact. "There would have to be evidence that she fought for her safety."

Jayne's fingers clenched into tight fists. "So you're just gonna... gonna go down there and let one of 'em knock ya around and then turn ya over to the feds?" he demanded. His voice was incredulous, like she had just proposed that they all take turns jumping out of the airlock or shooting themselves in the foot.

"Yes," River responded, as though it were the most logical thing in the world. "It is required."

Jayne's hands were big compared to the girl's arm. He could circle one whole hand around her upper arm, fingers touching. "You ain't doin' it, girl."

River's mouth was set in a firm line. "I am. And I will do it with or with out Jayne Cobb."

"I ain't lettin' one of them bastards put his hands on you," Jayne snarled.

River wrenched her arm out of Jayne's grasp. "You do not have a choice."

She disappeared up the ladder, pushing open the hatch and leaving Jayne empty handed. He'd made a grab for the girl; tried to pull her back down so's he could talk some sense into her crazy head. Jayne sat down heavily on the edge of his bed, trying to tell himself that he didn't give a good gorram what the crazy girl did. But he couldn't even fool himself with that one. The twinge of panic in his chest was a tell if he had ever seen one.

Pulling on his boots, Jayne scrambled up the ladder and into the empty corridor. He caught up with River just outside of the cargo bay, grabbing her shoulders and pulling her around to face him. "You done lost your mind for good, Crazy."

"Not crazy."

"The hell you ain't," Jayne muttered, his fingers clenching around her shoulders a little bit harder than before.

"She only asks you to do it because you are the most logical choice," River said, her voice cutting into him. "You have tried to sell her off like livestock before. She could use anyone though. You are interchangeable."

It felt like she'd punched him in the stomach, but he couldn't quite figure out why. "Yeah," he muttered. "You got that right. Tried to sell ya off once, huh? Who's to say I won't do it again?" he growled, voice rising in anger. "Hell, I wouldn'ta got much for ya anyway, scrawny thing like you."

She shoved him, twice. Jayne was forced to take a big step backwards, the girl was stronger than she looked. River packed a lot of strength into that skinny little body of hers. She kept shoving, until his body was backed up against the opposite wall and then she started to hit, her small fists flying without aim.

Jayne struggled, trying to duck her blows, "Girl, you best stop that. I ain't gonna tell ya again!"

"She is not afraid of him. What is he going to do?" River taunted. "Jayne Cobb is a _ji bai_."

He shoved her, hard enough to send her colliding against the opposite bulkhead. Her head collided with a sharp crack and she slid down to the floor, her hair covering her face.

Jayne stopped cold, staring down at the girl as the anger drained out of his body. "Girl--," he started, but the words died on his lips when River's fist connected with Jayne's jaw, sending him reeling. The girl struck out again and he barely managed to duck to the left, letting her fist collide painfully with the metal wall instead.

"_Enough!_." A gun cocked and Mal stepped around the corner, his mouth set in a hard line. "Enough," he repeated. "This ain't no game. This is a _gan tsao_ war."

The gun wavered from Jayne to River and back to Jayne. "Now, she ain't gonna let this go, Jayne," the Colonel said. "River here has got her mind made up and I wager she's gonna do this with or with out us and I'd feel a helluva lot better if'n we had some say in this. I don't know what's goin' on between the two of you--" Jayne opened his mouth to speak, but Mal held up a hand. "I don't reckon I wanna know either. This is a war and we are losin' that war. There are dead boys barely old enough to have their first drink lyin' in my cargo bay and live ones that are 'bout to take their place. We're losin' this war and if River says she can get us intel..." he paused and Jayne could read the conflicting emotions flickering across his face. "Well," Mal continued, "I don't see us bein' in a position to argue with her. So you _will _turn her in on the next planet we come across and that ain't no request, Jayne. That's an order."

Jayne's hands were clenched up so tight he was leaving little half moon marks on his palms. "Yessir," he growled and it killed him to say it.

Mal nodded. "Good. We'll be stoppin' off on Persephone in a few hours."

Jayne turned his back, refusing to meet River's eyes and heading back to his bunk. His shoulders felt weighed down, like he was carrying the whole 'verse on them.


	8. PART VII

**NOTES:** This part is noticeably shorter than the other parts, but Ferdinand (my muse) felt that this was were it ended.

---------------------------

They landed on Persephone before the sun had even risen planet side.

Jayne had been holed up in his bunk for hours. Mal had ordered him up to the bridge to iron out the details with him and River. "M'only takin' one _feng le_ order a day," Jayne had growled through the thick metal of the hatch door. So the Captain had let him be.

The soldiers had headed out early, they'd been off the boat as soon as they had docked and Mal didn't reckon he could blame them. Being bunked up with dead men in the hold of a cargo transport weren't his idea of a vacation either.

River was tense. It didn't take a reader to figure that out. Her shoulders were set in a rigid line and her lips were pressed together tight. She clasped one of Wash's dinosaurs in her hands, worrying it between her fingers.

"You ain't gotta do this, lil' Albatross," Mal told her, again. He'd been saying it over and over again but every time he did the girl just nodded and mumbled something about them all dying and that weren't exactly a comforting thought for anybody.

River stared up at him with those big eyes of hers, "Is Simon gone?"

Mal sighed, the girl had made up her mind. Spies were nothing new in war. He knew that the Independents and Alliance had both used spies in the first Unification war. But it didn't make it any easier sending River off to the job. If it were someone else, someone faceless and voiceless who he hadn't spent the last two years protecting he'd be fine with this. Mal fell into the co-pilots chair, like his bones were suddenly too heavy.

"Yeah," he replied finally, "Sent him off 'bout an hour ago with Kaylee. They'll be gone most of the day." It had been River's idea to send Simon away for the day with Kaylee, the only other person who had no idea what she was planning on doing.

"You remember how we're gonna play this?" Mal asked, fiddling with the switches so that he would have something to do with his hands.

River nodded. "The girl will send a WAVE every day at 16:00 hours. If she should fail to contact Serenity, you will come and get me."

Mal nodded, preoccupied. "Guess you'd better go get Jayne," he said gruffly. He wanted to prolong this. He wanted to stall and keep her talking and maybe Simon and Kaylee would come back early and they would have to regroup and come up with a new plan.

"This is the only plan," River said softly. Her voice was tight with nervousness and anticipation. She stood up and hesitated for a second, hovering between Mal and the doorway before she turned and disappeared.

Jayne was waiting for her when she rounded the corner. He was slumped against the wall, Betty and Sarah strapped to either thigh and Lucille slung across his chest. "Ready?" he demanded gruffly, averting his eyes. River frowned, Jayne hadn't looked her in the eyes in more days than she could count on both hands.

"I think so," River mumbled, cocking her head to glance up at Jayne. He'd already started walking though, several large strides in front of her. He still hadn't looked at her.

"Jayne," River mumbled. He didn't stop, so she tried again, a little louder this time. "J_ayne?_"

Jayne stopped in his tracks, back rigid and his eyes focused on the bulkhead to her left. She wanted to grab his face between her hands and force him to look at her. But she didn't. Instead, River fisted her hands in the skirt of her dress. "She cannot look as though she went willingly."

Jayne's face tightened even more. "Ain't you askin' enough of me?" he demanded, his voice so quiet that for a minute River didn't think that she had heard him at all.

When she didn't answer him, he turned away and started walking again, his boots pounding hard against the deck. River followed with her head down, her heart filled up with Jayne's dread and a little bit of her own. Simon would be angry when he came back and found her gone. She could already feel his rage. He would take it out first on Jayne and then the Captain. Blaming them each in turn, but never blaming River. She had left him a letter pinned to his pillow. She didn't want to leave him with out explaining, even though she knew that he would never accept her explanation. Even after he read it, he would still blame Jayne and to a lesser extent, Mal. Of course, they must have put her up to it. Of course.

Persephone was exactly like she remembered it. Loud and bustling, there were street vendors selling suspicious looking meats on sticks and dried jerky, rice and noodles out of little carts and every kind of bauble and bit of shine you would expect to find in a vendors stall. They passed a handful of Alliance soldiers and River sidestepped closer to Jayne. He wrapped one large hand around her forearm and held her still. "Not yet," he muttered hoarsely and River nodded her consent.

They had a two hour time frame in which to do this and have it over with. Jayne would return to Serenity shortly before Simon, if they had planned everything out right. Inara would distract him and Kaylee by fawning over their purchases until Mal could get them a suitable distance away from Persephone. She knew her brother and if he were to find her gone before they'd broken atmo, he would all but throw himself out of the airlock to get back to her.

She felt badly, knowing how hurt he and Kaylee would be, not only that she had done this, but that she had kept them in the dark about it. But Kaylee would have tried to talk her out of it and River would never put her friend in a position to lie to Simon. He would never have forgiven her and it had taken too much stumbling and clumsy advances to get them together in the first place.

"You hungry, girl?" Jayne's voice was low and River could barely hear him over the cacophony of the crowd. He always mumbled his words around her lately and River wondered briefly if she had broken him. She missed the loud, gruff Jayne who never thought before he spoke. The war was breaking everyone down, but Mal and Jayne bore it the hardest. She could see it in the slope of their shoulders and in the dimness of their eyes. Jayne didn't dream about whores and cartoon characters and guns and booze anymore. He dreamed of trenches and corpses and digging graves. Mal's dreams were even worse. River tried to avoid them, whenever she could.

Jayne steered her towards a noodle vendor, not waiting for her answer. "Might as well," he said, in that same gruff, mumbling voice. "Dunno when they'll feed ya."

While Jayne and the vendor discussed prices and quantities in Chinese, River shifted impatiently at his side. She watched the mothers, tugging their children behind them impatiently and the old men standing in front of their stalls, harking. It amazed River how little she had paid attention to common things like this. Or maybe it was like how a man bound for prison suddenly noticed how green the grass was.

"Here, girl," Jayne shoved a bowl of steaming noodles into her hands and nudged her in the direction of a bench between a stall selling cheap trinkets and another selling used musical instruments. River sniffed at the bowl; she wasn't hungry, her stomach was tied up too tightly into knots for that. But Jayne was right. She didn't know when or how she would be fed. It was better to eat a full lunch first.

They ate in silence. The heat made River's hair stick to the back of her neck and her clothes felt damp. Jayne was twitchy. His fingers fidgeted against the bowl in his hand and his feet tapped a rhythm into the hard packed earth.

"Jayne..." she started, unsure of what she was going to say. But the silence was starting to wear on her and she had to break it with something.

Jayne shushed her with out looking up and River scowled down into her bowl of noodles. He was a jumble of emotions and even when she focused and tried to discern one from the other, it was almost impossible. She sensed fear and anger and resentment. And maybe a little relief. That hurt her, but she struggled to keep it off of her face and for the most part, she succeeded.

"Arright," Jayne muttered, scrapping the last of the sauce off of the bottom of the bowl with his spoon. "Now's as good'a time as any."

River nodded hesitantly and dumped her mostly unfinished bowl of noodles into the trash can, trailing after Jayne. The closer she got to becoming property of the Academy again, the more reluctant she felt.

Jayne paused, twisting her around to face him and for the first time in longer than she could remember, he met her eyes. "Ain't gotta do this," he reminded her, gruff. "Just say the word an we'll get back to the ship."

River wavered, her eyes staring over his shoulder towards the docks, where she knew Serenity was waiting. It was tempting to tell Jayne that she'd changed her mind and return to the safety and solitude of her cock pit. But then she remembered the dreams and the visions and the overwhelming feeling of despair that always accompanied them. Simon and Kaylee's broken, burnt bodies. Jayne's corpse, ripped into shreds from the bullet holes.

She shivered and shook her head, "No, it has to be done and I am the only one who can do this. I can help," she said firmly. Jayne's gaze shifted again, away from her, and she knew that he wouldn't look at her again.

"Alright," Jayne said slowly. "Alright. Let's git this over with."

River swallowed hard. Her belly was fluttering with nervous energy and the rush of adrenaline was making her light headed. She offered her arm to Jayne and he gently wrapped his big hand around her upper arm. She squared her shoulders, preparing herself to struggle against him.

"River," Jayne's voice was rough and strained. He was trying to keep his voice down and it didn't come naturally to him, just like being gentle didn't come naturally to him. He grabbed her jaw in the palm of the hand that wasn't holding tight to her upper arm and his lips crushed hers.

She barely had time to register it-- to kiss him back eagerly-- when he broken contact like she'd burned him. "Gorramn it, girl," he hollered, dragging her out into the open and wrapping his other arm around her waist. River's body responded on autopilot, even while her mind was still reeling. She half-heartedly struggled against Jayne's strong arms. "I need an MP," he yelled, as River's teeth dug into his straining forearm. "I got somethin' for 'em."

The response was almost immediate. Alliance soldiers poured out of the wood work and immediately began to question Jayne. What was going on? Who was this girl? What was the problem? They were obviously reserve soldiers, River though with disdain. Anyone directly involved with the Second Unification War would know Major Jayne Cobb and Captain River Tam on sight. _Especially_ River Tam, once fugitive from the Alliance turned Independent sympathizer and pilot.

"Oh my god, River!"

River's heart sank and she could feel Jayne's grip around her waist tighten involuntarily when they heard Kaylee's voice. Jayne whipped them both around to face the intrusion. Kaylee had dropped the box of engine parts that she'd been carrying and her mouth formed a shocked little circle.

"Kaylee?" Simon's voice. He burst around the corner, his eyes on Kaylee. "Kaylee, what--," Simon's eyes flicked over to River and Jayne and his face flared. His fingers clenched into fists and River could almost see the rage coming off of him in waves.

"_Cao!_" he exclaimed, stopping in his tracks. "_Cao ni zu zong shi ba dai! _River, just hold still. Jayne, you _gan tsao shen jing bing! _Let her go!" Simon's face had blanched and the color had drained out of his skin. His hands were clenched so tight that River thought his bones would crack under the pressure.

"Simon!" she shrieked, her heart sinking in fear. She wanted to warn him off. To promise that Mal and Jayne would explain everything. But if she did, they would all be caught. So she widened her eyes and played the act of the terrified little sister.

She could feel Jayne's uncertainty and she threw herself backwards against him to catch his attention. "I got me a fugitive here. Thought you boys might take 'er off my hands," he drawled, glancing over at Simon and Kaylee sideways.

"Oh, Jayne," Kaylee gasped, heart broken. Little Kaylee who could keep smiling in the middle of a gorram war. Kaylee who believed that there was good in everyone, even Jayne. She was feeling betrayed, River knew. But she dutifully cut herself off from Simon and Kaylee's emotions. She focused only on the task at hand. To get herself, Jayne and the Alliance soldiers away from Simon and Kaylee and into the safety of one of the nearby buildings where Jayne could give her up and leave with promises of a fat paycheck coming to him in a few days.

"River!" Simon choked out. River screamed when he plunged headfirst into the group of Alliance soldiers. She could give credit where credit was due, most of them had figured out who and what they were dealing with by now.

There was the crack of gunfire and Simon's eyes widened. His hands cupped his gut and River would smell the sharp tang of blood in the acrid air. He crumpled to the ground and Kaylee screamed, her voice mingling with River's. She fought against Jayne in earnest when he began to tug her away from Simon's prone body, the Alliance soldiers ushered them into the tavern across the street.

"Simon!" she screamed, digging her nails into Jayne's strong forearms. "_Lao tien_!"

"Captain River Tam," one of the soldiers said, grasping her forearm and attempting to pull her out of Jayne's grasp. "You are bound by law to stand down."

They tugged her further into the dark, musky building and the door swung shut. She couldn't see Simon anymore, but she could hear Kaylee's pleas for help. River shuddered and struggled in vain and Jayne's arms tightened around her middle. In one swift movement, he had his gun out of it's holster, safety released and he was pointing it at the soldier with his hands circling River's forearm in a vice grip.

"Ain't gonna be no arrestin'. You just let her go and step back," Jayne growled. River could feel his growing panic on top of her own. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she moaned helplessly. The plan was rapidly disintegrating. Simon wasn't supposed to be there-- but he was, and now he was laying out in the street, gut shot. Jayne had discarded the plan and now he was foolishly going to attempt to fight his way out of a room full of armed Alliance soldiers with only one gun and his arm wrapped tightly around River's waist. And River knew that they would not hesitate to kill Jayne to get to her, now that they knew who she was and how valuable she could be.

River's fingers tightened around Jayne's forearm, the muscles were chorded and bunching together with the strain of trying to hold her wriggling body still. "Jayne," she whimpered, desperate. The Alliance soldier's collective fingers were tightening on the triggers of their guns. She could feel them, moving almost like one entity. They blurred together to her. She wanted to tell him to stop, to go back to the plan.

"Mr. Cobb, it is highly recommended that you drop your weapon," the soldier who appeared to be taking control of the situation said, his voice steady. His gun never wavered and his eyes were emotionless. All of their eyes were emotionless, River though, looking into their faces.

"You drop _your_ weapon," Jayne countered, growling. She could his chest rumbling with the familiar noise and in that second, she realized that he was going to die. The soldiers were going to kill him, shoot him and leave him for dead, bleeding out on the rough wood grain of the floor just like they'd left Simon in the street.

In one swift movement, River wrenched out of Jayne's grasp. She caught only one brief look at his confused, stunned face before she bent at the waist, her upper body running parallel to the ground as her inside leg came up to connect with Jayne's temple. It was a quick movement, nothing more than a flash, but when it was over Jayne was crumpled on the ground. He still held the gun in his twitching fingers.


	9. PART VIII

**NOTES:** I am a horrible, evil person. Please don't stone me. _:hides:_

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Jayne's temples were pounding when he blinked the grit out of his eyes. Someone was nudging him in the ribs with the toe of their shoe and he swung out one big arm without looking, trying to smack them away.

"What the hell're you doin' in here?" an unfamiliar voice demanded. "Come on, get up."

The voice annoyed him and exacerbated his already throbbing head. Jayne swung out again, this time connecting with an ankle. The jabbing stopped and he struggled to push himself up with one arm, massaging his aching ribs with the other.

"Well?" the voice demanded again. "Who're you? And why're you in here? Ain't nobody s'posed to be in here til we open."

Jayne muttered a Mandarin curse under his breath and scrubbed one large palm over his face. He struggled to see through his bleary, unfocused eyes. Jayne's mind raced to come up with a story-- a lie- to explain why he was someplace he shouldn't be.

_River._

The thought was sudden and it caught him in the gut. With a shudder, Jayne dry heaved and coughed until he couldn't breathe. The voice-- a man, Jayne realized-- stared down at him, emotionless. "Sorry," Jayne gasped, when he could breathe again. "Sorry," he muttered again, pushing himself to his feet awkwardly and stumbling for the door.

The kick to the head the girl had given him had done a number on him. His temple was throbbing and the pain was making him feel like he was two seconds away from throwing up the contents of his stomach. The street outside of the tavern was mostly empty when he clumsily half-fell through the doors. It was probably close to nightfall, Jayne realized. He'd been out for hours and he couldn't help but wonder if the girl hadn't slipped something into his food, because a kick to the head shouldn't have put him down for that long. He stared at a dark patch in the dirt of the road and he remembered Simon.

Simon had seen them. He and Kaylee had seen Jayne, turning River over to the feds. Gut shot, Jayne remembered. Simon had been gut shot. He wondered who had dragged the doc's _pi gu_ back to Serenity. Had it been Kaylee? All by herself? Or, another thought occurred to him, had Simon not made it back at all?

Jayne shook his head, trying to clear it but all he succeeded in doing was making the throbbing between his temples worse. He stumbled once, his balance thrown off by the unwavering ache. Jayne groaned and hobbled in the direction of the docks. His progress was slow, every heavy fall of his booted feet sent a shock wave of pain up his spine and to his aching skull. What should have been a fifteen minute walk took Jayne almost a half an hour. When he finally crested the low hill that hid the dock from sight, he realized with sinking dread, that Serenity's alloted berth was empty. Number forty-six stood open and vacant and Jayne knew for a fact that the ship had been sitting there when he left. A quick scan of the other berths and he realized that Serenity wasn't there at all.

------------------------

The room tasted sterile.

It was strange, River thought, how a room could taste, but she felt it on her tongue: heavy and medicinal. For a minute, she thought that she was waking up in Serenity's infirmary. But she couldn't move her arms or legs or neck and Simon would never restrain her so completely. There were many times, she knew, when he should have. But he was her brother and he loved her and he couldn't.

"She's waking up," a voice said. The voice was vaguely familiar. She had heard it once or twice before. River's eyes snapped open and she screamed, loud and guttural. She only stopped when her throat was ragged and her voice broke, her lungs empty.

She was in the blue room. River screamed again, her whole body shaking and quivering. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to focus. She needed to concentrate on keeping herself whole and unbroken. It wouldn't do anyone any good if she crumbled into pieces within the first hour. They were depending on her. Mal and Jayne and Kaylee and--

Simon. Oh god, Simon.

River whimpered, tears pouring down her cheeks in thick rivulets. She could replay the entire scene on the backs of her eyelids. It was one of the curses of having a photographic memory. She watched and re-watched Simon's face crumpling and his hands pushing against the blood pouring out of his abdomen. Simon fixed all of them but who would fix Simon? River's body shook harder while she desperately tried to shove the memory and thoughts of her brother into the back of her mind. She couldn't think about Simon, she had to think about the mission. Her mission. She had to concentrate on staying whole and unbroken.

"R. Tam?" this voice, too, was familiar. She recognized it as the voice of the man who had been present when they had first cut her skull open and took what wasn't theirs to take.

"Dr. Chang," River replied, struggling to keep her voice even.

"Oh good," the Doctor said. "You remember me." He sounded genuinely pleased that River had remembered his name. It only made her want to hurt him more.

River snarled and bucked against the restraints pinning her against the table. Logically, she knew that her resistance was stupid and would only exhaust energy that she needed to save and time that she didn't have to waste. But maybe more of Jayne had rubbed off on her than she had previously thought because she couldn't-- _wouldn't_-- go willingly. She knew what she had to do, but her pride would not let her go with out a fight.

"R. Tam, please don't force us to sedate you again. It will only prolong the set of medical examinations we must conclude," the doctor told her jovially.

River's entire body shuddered at the thought of the examinations. She whimpered and the doctor regarded her with a patronizing smile that never reached his eyes. Everything about him had always seemed too cold and clinical to River. She remembered wondering if he were made from plastic. Sometimes she'd thought that maybe he was not real at all but some type of artificial intelligence.

As if to prove that he was serious about sedating her again, the doctor held up a syringe and flicked it with two fingers. He turned towards her, brow arched, as though to silently ask what she planned to do.

Gritting her teeth, River quieted and struggled to keep herself calm. She couldn't fall apart, not when too much was riding on her thin shoulders. Somehow, she had wrapped herself up in the going-- the _doing-- _of this plan. The initial being taken. She hadn't thought beyond that first event, except that it needed to be done.

"That's better," the doctor replied. He was somewhere off to the left of River's head now. He had sensed her acquiescence and she could hear the clink and scrape of metal on metal. "We'll want to find out how far R. Tam has regressed in her studies," Dr. Chang was saying.

River's body bowed upward and she screamed when the needle thrust through her forehead.

------------------------

Jayne's shoulders hunched as he fell onto the bar stool. He felt a strange kind of desolation that he'd never felt before. Weren't like this was the first time he'd been in this situation, either: alone in a bar with only the clothes he was wearing and the credits in his pocket. He'd been stabbed in the back and betrayed more'n once. He'd lost his weapons, his clothes and the roof over his head a few more times than he would have liked in a business deal gone South. It wasn't, by any stretch of the imagination, the first time he'd bellied up to a bar, plunked down the last of his credits and gotten himself falling down drunk to compensate for the bad hand he'd been dealt this time.

The situation was the same, the physical actions were identical, but the emotions he was feeling couldn't have been more different. Usually, in these situations, Jayne felt irritated, put out and angry. As he ordered the strongest whiskey he could buy on what he had left in his pocket, he felt worried and betrayed. Being left behind felt personal this time, where as before he would have considered it a job hazard.

The worry that knotted his stomach, though, mostly had to do with River. Gorram, but the girl was stubborn to a fault. She'd put that plan in motion and she was going to follow it through come hell or high water. He'd thought for sure that when her brother'd gotten shot she would have turned tail right back out of that bar, but she'd seen it to the end. If he weren't so upset with the girl for coming up with this _feng le_ idea in the first place, he might have admired her for sticking to it. He'd been ready to fight their way out of there, even though Jayne had seen just as well as anyone that it would have been an exercise in futility; him and Lucille against all them Alliance boys.

What he didn't understand, though, was how he'd made it out of there with out at least one bullet hole put in him. He was an Independence soldier-- and not just an enlisted man either, he was a ranking officer. He knew those Core boys had sissified ideas about how war should be conducted, but he figured they might have at least taken a pot shot at him after River had put him down.

Jayne's back went rigid when he felt the soft, feather-light touch trailing over his shoulder and down his bicep. The girl was blond, big and buxom. She was also very obviously for sale. Her face was painted up and her hair hung in careful curls down her back, her dress was low cut and there was a slit in the side clean up to her hip.

She smiled at him, a wide smile that showed off her gap teeth. "You all alone?" she asked, looking at him through hooded eyes.

Jayne shrugged and hunched his shoulders, turning back towards his whiskey. The girl didn't take the hint and leave, she sidled up closer to him, her hand resting on his forearm. "You look all alone," she pointed out, leaning back against the bar. "Look like you're all alone and you done lost your best friend," she purred, easing in closer until Jayne could smell the sour of old whiskey on her breath.

He grunted and downed the last of his whiskey. It burned his throat all the way and down, just the way he liked it. "Looks're decievin'," he pointed out, leaning back on the bar stool so he could get a good look at her. His balance wavered and for a moment, he teetered precariously on the stool. "Ain't alone, seein' as there's two of us, ain't there?"

------------------------

River's entire body thrummed with pain as she shifted slightly on the bed. It was made completely of plastic, there were no sharp edges that she could use to injure herself. The bed was the only piece of furniture in the stark room. She was dressed in a light blue smock and light blue tights with rectangular metal electrodes attached from thigh to calf. If she went into a restricted zone they would send deep shocks of electricity directly into her muscles. The room itself was white and it tasted just as sterile as the blue room had.

Her sense of time had been desperately thrown off. The procedures had left her buzzing and disoriented and she'd been unconscious for much of it. River eased her aching body off of her cot and limped towards the doorway. There was a small, thick window, a few inches above her head. River drew herself up on her tip toes and pressed her face against the glass. The tiny sliver of the hallway that she could see was empty.

River's whole body shivered as she dropped back down to the cold tile flooring. The feeling of dread she got from being back in this building hadn't left her stomach since she'd woken up in the Blue Room. Everything was wrong; her whole 'verse felt like it was spinning out from under her.

She crept slowly towards the bed; she knew that underneath of it, there was a flat, innocuous looking panel. The room had no windows and only one door that was sealed shut. The room was, effectively, a vacuum. But nothing, not even the assassins that the Alliance were trying to create, could live with out oxygen. There had to be some way to filter in air and River had decided that the most logical place to locate the filter would be under the bed. It was the only place in the room where it could be hidden away from prying eyes.

It took River only an hour and a half to pry the cover off of the vent. Her fingers were a bloody, swollen mess when she was finished and she sucked them one by one into her mouth. The pain didn't ease the way it had when Jayne had done it.

It felt like years ago now. It was the first job that she had gone out on and there was a tussle in some back alley bar. They'd all come out of it unscathed, except for River. She'd smashed a glass bottle over some _hun dan's _head and a sliver of glass had gotten stuck in her thumb. Sitting in the safety of the backseat of the mule, he'd said, "Gimme your hand, lemme see how bad it is." River had slowly offered him her fingertip and Jayne had immediately stuck it into his mouth. The jolt River felt was not entirely unpleasant as Jayne tongued the piece of glass out of the pad of her thumb.

Her fingers still throbbed mercilessly as she lowered herself into the vent and belly-crawled until she could see what looked like an empty office through the slats of the vent. It only took a minute to push this one out and clamber down into the room. They only wanted to keep someone from getting _into_ the vents, they didn't really care if someone got _out_ of them.

As River waited for the WAVE to connect with Serenity, she struggled to smooth her hair down and make herself presentable. She hid her hands in her lap and forced a smile on her face. She knew that it didn't reach her eyes, but she hoped no one would look too closely.

The machine gave a little beep and a message screen faded onto the monitor in both English and Chinese characters. The other party did not accept the WAVE. River's mouth fell into the familiar lines of a frown. It was the appointed time, Mal should be waiting for her contact.

Her stomach clenched into tight knots and she shoved a fist into her mouth to stifle the choked sobs. The plan she had once been so sure of had crumbled into pieces. She was locked away in the Academy again and Simon had been shot and Jayne... they had left him lying where he'd fallen and now... now she had a desperate need to connect with Serenity and she couldn't.

He'd been right, she realized. Jayne had been right. This plan had been _feng le_ from the beginning. She'd been a fool to think that any of it could possibly work.

The sound was so small, that River barely acknowledged it, except that every nerve in her body was tingling and she was already very much on edge: the clink of the tumblers in the doorknob behind her turning.

"_Eta kuram na smekh."_

River's eyes went wide and rolled back into her head as her body slumped to the ground in an awkward heap of limbs and tangled brown-black hair.


	10. PART IX

**NOTES: **I wrote this in the DMV, if that tells you anything about the crap-tasticness of DMV lines.

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The doctor's eyes looked tired and worn. The lines in his face were deeper than Mal remembered them being and he had an infinite sadness about him that he figured they were all carrying since the war had started up. They all carried a little bit of that sorrow in their bones.

"Tell me straight, doc," Mal said impatiently. The man was hesitant and Mal figured that was a bad sign if he ever saw one. But in his experience with doctors, they could never just come out and tell a man something. They had to work around it for a spell before they could just up and say it plain.

"He's damn lucky, if anything," Dr. Givens said, tugging at the end of his graying beard. Mal's eyes flicked behind the doctor. The infirmary was dimmed down but he could still make out Simon's prone body, his skin almost as white as the sheets covering him up. Kaylee and Inara were huddled around him, Kaylee looking older and sadder than she had any right to look.

"But?" Mal asked, scrubbing a palm over his face. There was too much weighing on his shoulders right now; he felt like his knees would give out and he would crumble.

"But... ain't no easy way to say this..." the doctor murmured, looking Mal straight in the eyes.

"Then just say it," the Colonel snapped impatiently.

"He ain't gonna walk again," Dr. Givens said finally, tugging so hard at that beard that Mal thought he was going to tug his whiskers clean out. It reminded him in a vague way of Simon's ear tugging and he wondered if all doctors had some kind of tic. "The bullet went clean through and nicked his spine and he's damn lucky it didn't shatter it, all told. If'n it did, weren't'a been nothin' I coulda done for the boy."

Mal sighed and sat down heavily, his face pinched and tight. "What am I gonna do with a doc who can't even use his legs?" he muttered, wincing when he realized how callous he sounded. He hadn't ever been a man known for his tact but he weren't heartless. Of course, war had a way of changing even the most kind hearted man into something hard and bitter. It was just the way of war.

"Nothing wrong with his hands," the doctor observed keenly, before disappearing to give the Colonel and his crew some time to themselves.

Another heavy sigh and Mal heaved himself to his feet.

"Where is River?" Simon croaked groggily. His eyes squinted and tried to focus on Mal's face through the haze of pain killers Dr. Givens had given him.

Inara cringed and Mal shifted his weight uncomfortably. "There'll be plenty of time to talk about that later, doc. Right now you just worry 'bout gettin' yourself better."

The doctor had left them to tell Simon just how extensive his injuries were, thought it'd do better coming from friends. Mal had been prepared to march in there and lay out all the cards on the table, but now that he was face to face with the doc, he couldn't do it. He couldn't watch Simon's face fall and listen while his despair bubbled up and pushed it's way out of him.

"No," Simon insisted, struggling to raise himself up. Kaylee and Inara half-rose to their feet, trying to coax him into laying back down but he wouldn't be deterred. "I want to know what's going on! Where is Jayne! And River! He was... I thought... I thought he considered her crew and he was turning her in... I trusted you with her and you let him turn her into the feds!" His voice was rising in pitch and his cheeks were flushed red with rage.

"It ain't somethin' we need to talk about right now," Mal insisted, struggling to stall Simon. There was too much that needed to be said and he had no idea where he should start.

Simon's eyes spit fire while his mouth twisted up in a scowl. "And when is it something that needs to be discussed, _Captain_," he hissed, spitting out the word 'captain' like it burned his tongue all the way out. "When my sister's brain is being cut into? Is that the appropriate time?"

Mal pinched the bridge of his nose, gorram, but Simon couldn't make this any harder. "We'll talk about it when I say we talk about it, _doctor_," he spat, letting his frustration get the better of him.

The two men held a stare down, neither of them willing to blink. Both of their faces were sat in hard, stubborn scowls: Simon's filled with righteous indignation and Mal's with obstinate resistance.

"Maybe we should just--," Kaylee began, desperately trying to defuse the situation. She felt like a wrung out cloth, limp and drained. Her gut had been twisted up into knots all day and her nerves were on edge.

"No!" Simon interrupted sharply. He tried to shove himself up into a sitting position,his eyes never leaving Mal's. "If he doesn't want to help me look for my sister, I can do it on my own!" Simon winced in pain and his face grayed but he refused to allow Kaylee and Inara to push him back down on to the bed. "I did it once before! I can do it again!"

Mal's face was pinched with anger. "_No!_" he insisted, "You _can't_ do it on your own!"

"Oh?" Simon barked out with a snide laugh. "And why is _that!_ Do enlighten me, because I--"

"Because you _can't walk!_" the Colonel thundered.

The minute the words left his mouth, Mal regretted them. Simon's face crumpled and paled until he was almost translucent, his skin revealing the patterns of blue veins underneath their surface. Kaylee gasped, one hand fluttering up to press against her mouth in a balled up fist.

A silent struggle played out on the doc's face and finally, he gave a bitter laugh. "Of course," he muttered. "No, of course." More mirthless laughter gurgled up out of Simon's throat and Kaylee and Inara both wore identical expressions of horror.

Mal turned his back before the laughter turned into choked sobs. "We'll be leavin' in a few more hours," he muttered, refusing to look into any of their faces. "Suggest you get yourselves tidied up."

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There had been no WAVE's in the past hour and a half. Mal's pale fingers were clenched around the arms of the pilot's chair and his neck felt knotted up. It was an hour and a half since River's first scheduled contact point; an hour and a half that Mal had spent in the pilot's chair, waiting impatiently for the beep of an incoming message. Sure, he'd expected _something_ to go wrong eventually, it weren't like he was a big fan of this plan from the get go. But he'd never expected something to wrong so _quickly_.

The Colonel flinched when Inara's cool hand smoothed against the back of his neck. Her skilled fingers rubbed at the knots at the base, but even that couldn't calm him down. He wondered briefly when his relationship with Inara had moved past taking awkward jabs and pot shots at one another into something where they could touch and talk so casually. Mal wondered if it were before or after those two days spent locked up tight in his bunk after Zoe'd been shipped back to them in a box. He sighed; Inara deserved much more than he was in a position to give her. He took the comfort she offered but he couldn't offer any up in return.

"Nothing?" the former Companion asked, her fingers still making warm little circles against the base of his neck. Mal willed himself to bend and mold under Inara's hands but he couldn't; his back remained rigid and his fingers refused to unclench.

"Nope," he said, finally glancing up at her. "The doc and Kaylee settled into the infirmary?"

Inara nodded wearily, sitting down slowly in the co-pilots seat. She busied her nervous hands arranging her skirts around herself. "I think so. Dr. Givens gave Simon something to help him sleep. Kaylee should be sleeping herself, but..." she trailed off. "She wants to be there for Simon when he wakes up."

Mal nodded and his gaze flicked back to the WAVE. The screen was still blank and he knew it would remain that way. If River hadn't made contact by now, something was wrong and she wouldn't be making contact at all.

"This all fell to shit," he said, ruefully. "Guess I was a fool for thinkin' it could work in the first place. Reckon' we need to head back for Jayne first..." he muttered, half to himself and half to Inara.

They'd left Jayne back on Persephone. They'd had to when Lil' Kaylee had come staggering up, Simon's dead weight pressing her into the ground and blood smeared all across the both of them. Simon'd needed a doctor and they weren't gonna find one on Persephone. At least, not an Independent sympathizer of a doctor. The nearest Independent encampment where they'd like to have a doctor was Ezra.

It'd been a long half a day to get there, with Simon slipping in and out of consciousness and Kaylee and Inara doing what they could to keep him comfortable and staunch the flow of blood. Mal figured it had been touch and go for a while, but they'd pulled him through.

"Go and get some rest, Mal," Inara told him softly, she reached out as though she were going to smooth one cool palm over his forehead, but at the last minute, she let her hand drop down into her lap. The silence between them was heavy and awkward and finally, with a nod, Mal rose and headed for his bunk.

"If you hear anything--" he began, pausing uncertainly at the doorway.

Inara cut him off with a gentle nod, "I'll come and get you."

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He was awake, alternating between squeezing his eyes closed tight and staring up at the ceiling. Whenever he could see Kaylee's shadow hovering just outside the infirmary door, he would clench his eyes shut so that he didn't have to see her face fall.

"Simon?" she whispered softly, padding softly into the infirmary in bare feet. In a quick, guilty flash, Simon hated her. He hated her for being able to do something he would never do again. He hated her for taking it for granted, just like he had always taken it for granted.

He flinched when Kaylee smoothed her warm palm across his forehead. "What?" he mumbled flatly and he felt her movements falter.

"I just... I wanted to spend some time with you is all," she said softly. "Almost lost you yesterday." He could feel her shift her weight from one foot to the other and he hated her again. It was nothing but a quick flash of emotion, but it left his gut twisting with guilt.

"I'd rather..." Simon squeezed his eyes shut again so he wouldn't have to look up into her concerned face. "I'd rather just be by myself right now Kaylee."

"Are you..." she trailed off and he could feel her uncertainty. She didn't know how to behave around him anymore, he thought bitterly, now that she knew that he would never walk again. "Are you sure?"

"Please just... leave me alone," he snapped.

Kaylee fell quiet, "Why do you gotta hurt me all the time?" she asked, so soft he wondered if she'd really said it or if he'd imagined it.

She was gone when he opened his eyes, slipping out of the room so quietly that he'd never heard her leave.

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"_Shabi_" Mal cursed under his breath. Inara's fingers tightened on his shoulder as the smoking rubble of the Eavesdown docks spread out in front of Serenity.

Persephone was a hollowed out wreck. In the distance, there were loud explosions and puffs of smoke, there was still a battle going on farther inland. Mal cursed again and pushed Serenity lower, gliding over the wreckage. They'd only been gone three days at the most, but the battle had obviously been hasty and quick. The ground was marred with craters and there wasn't a building left standing for as far as they could see in either direction.

"Should be over here," Mal muttered, his sharp eyes picking through the mess below him. The bar where they had left Jayne, passed out on the dirty floor, should have been directly underneath of them. And maybe it was, but now it was a few splintered boards and a crater in the earth.

"If Jayne..." Inara began. One of her hands was pressed to her mouth and her eyes were wide. He forgot that she, Simon and Kaylee had been kept as far away from the actual fighting as he could get 'em. She'd never seen any of this first hand.

"If Jayne was still in there," Mal finished for her, "Ain't enough of 'im left to put in the ground."

He felt Inara flinch behind him and he half-lifted his hand to pull her around in front of him and envelope her body with his. He wanted to give her that comfort that she'd been giving him, but his body remained immobile and he dropped his hand back down into his lap.

"But he weren't in that building," he told her, matter of fact. "He ain't that dumb." Mal didn't add that even if Jayne hadn't been in _that_ building, it didn't mean that he wasn't in one of the other, equally decimated buildings. He was just counting on Jayne having the brains to get gone when the fighting started. Of course, counting on Jayne to have brains was like counting on a pig to fly. Not likely.

"What are we going to do?" Inara asked softly. The beams of light coming down off of Serenity's belly, lighting their way, shone over a woman's mangled corpse and Inara pressed her fist against her teeth to keep herself quiet. This was what Mal and Jayne and River saw every day, she realized. This was why the three of them looked as though the 'Verse was pressing down on them hard enough to break their bones when River brought them all back to whatever hole-in-the-wall encampment that she, Simon and Kaylee were hiding out in. This was why those boys in the cargo bay came back hollower and hollower. Their eyes were nothing but dark wounds in their faces now. She remembers when they used to be boys-- excited, idealistic boys. She used to be able to hear them laughing and stomping around down there, but now they moved softly, like they were dead but their bodies just haven't realized it yet.

"We're gonna put down as soon as I find someplace where we ain't gonna draw attention to ourselves, then we're gonna pick through this rubble 'til we find Jayne," Mal mumbled, more to himself than to her. Inara's stomach turned when she thought of lifting up those boards and staring into the bloated, mangled faces of whatever corpse she had uncovered.

"And if he's..." she trailed off, her lips pressing together in a thin, tight line. If Jayne had been in any of those buildings, she didn't want to think about just how much of him there would be left to find.

"Ain't leavin' a man behind," the Colonel told her sternly. She watched a muscle in his jaw twitch and remembered when he'd told her that if he ever began fighting a war, she would know. He'd been right, she could see the soldier in his haunted, dark eyes. She could see the soldier in the set of his mouth and his hunched, aching shoulders. She could see it in the way he struggled quietly over ever decision he made, knowing that no matter which way he decided, he was going to be responsible for sending some of those boys down in the bay home to their mamas in crates.

"Gonna put down over there," Mal decided, gesturing towards a group of scraggly looking trees to their left. What was left of the trees were charred and blackened, but they would be sufficient cover if no one was looking close enough. Serenity groaned slightly when Mal turned her towards the clearing. As far as Inara could tell, Kaylee was holding the ship together with spit and a prayer.

Both of them flinched when they received the WAVE. Inara's nerves were so wrecked that she suspected she might try to crawl out of her own skin.

"Colonel Reynolds?"

Inara's heart fell when she recognized the face: Brigadier General Conrad James. His skin was lined and weathered, it had always reminded Inara of old leather, crinkled and smooth She'd silently been praying that it was River and she would tell them that she was all right.

"General James." She knew Mal was struggling to keep his voice light. His spine bowed out and she wondered if emotional stress could literally become physical pressure. She wondered how much more of it Mal could take before his shoulders couldn't support it and his spine snapped under the strain.

"Corporal Sera," Brigadier General James acknowledged. Inara spared what she hoped was a gracious nod in his direction.

"We've got some noise on Hera, Reynolds," the Brigadier General was saying. "Got some Alliance boys over there lookin' to settle in. We're sendin' you and the 4077 over there to feel things out. You'll contact at 0700 and let headquarters know if you're needin' more boys."

Inara's fingers tightened on the back of the chair as she silently watched the General pile up more weight on Mal's already aching shoulders. She watched his face pale and his mouth tighten. "We've got a man missing, General," Mal explained. "Had to leave 'im on Persephone when our medic took a hit."

The General's expression never changed and Inara wondered if Mal would ever affect that same lack of emotion she'd seen from the General and other commanding officers. "If your man was on Persephone, he's long dead, Reynolds. We got live boys on Hera waiting on you."

Mal's shoulders stiffened, he was spoiling for a fight and Inara wondered briefly if he would refuse the direct order. She watched him struggle silently and finally, he gave a nod. "Yessir," he muttered, two fingers touching his forehead in a salute.

When the transmission ended and the screen went blank, she watched Mal crumple inwards. It was almost embarrassing, watching his shoulders fall and his face break. Inara lay what she hoped was a soothing hand on his shoulders. "Jayne kept himself alive for thirty years as a mercenary before he ever joined up with Serenity," she reminded him. "He didn't die here."

Mal deftly set the ship to follow the coordinates that the General had left. "Better get yourself strapped in," he told her quietly, "We're breakin' atmo in five and it ain't gonna be smooth-like as it is when River does it."

She squeezed past him and into the co-pilots seat, pulling the five point harness around her body and strapping herself down. "Hera?" she asked. "What do we have on Hera that they could..." She trailed off, her face paling as she realized exactly what they had on Hera that was worth something to the Alliance troops. Serenity Valley.

"Tryin' to make a point," Mal muttered, half to Inara and half to himself. "They're tryin' to break us down. They know that we know that we're losin'."


	11. PART X

**NOTES:** Wow... that was fast. I wanted to finish this today/tonight because I work for the next billion years straight. Argh.

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Jayne couldn't remember how long he'd been stuck down there, breathing in the damp, sour smelling air and feeling his way around. As far as he could tell, there were six people down in the basement with him. Seven, if you counted the baby. It had been crying on and off since they'd all stumbled down there, it's mother frantically trying to shush it. He didn't think the girl was more than sixteen or seventeen. She couldn't have been older than River, anyways. It didn't surprise Jayne none to see her with a baby on her hip though. It was how things worked out on the rim and while Persephone weren't technically on the rim, they were as good as.

It made him a mite twitchy, standing in the pitch black cellar with six people he didn't know from a hole in the ground. For all he knew, one of them might have been a Purple-belly, waiting for the chance to put a bullet in him. He counted at least three men and the rest women-folk. They seemed like Independent sympathizers, the lot of them. Of course, the way things were and the way things seemed were often two very different things.

They'd been down there for what felt like weeks, maybe months. But logically, Jayne knew it had only been a few days at most. He was trying to keep his head down, not draw too much attention to him, so he stayed put.

The resistance the Independent soldiers and the townsfolk had put up was laughable, at most. So far as he knew, no one had known that the Alliance had it's eye on Persephone, although maybe he should have figured it out, given that the place had been crawling with feds. He'd been too caught up in River and her _feng le_ plan to notice, though. 

He heard it first; the low creak of a door opening and the rhythmic thud of boots on the wood plank flooring over their heads. One of the women gave a low, terrified moan and Jayne heard the rub of skin on skin as someone clamped their hand over her mouth. 

"Shush up," he hissed, pressing himself to one side of the wall underneath the trap door that swung down into their hiding place. "All of ya just keep your gorram mouths shut."

He'd lost Lucille somewhere between the bar and the cellar. But he clung to Betty and Sarah, one in each big palm. The clunk of the boots grew closer and his fingers twitched on the trigger. His belly sank to his knees when he heard the sound of a baby snuffling in that way that said that it was going to start wailing it's head off at any second. The boot steps were almost directly above them when the baby started crying. He could hear the mama hushing it and he could feel the vibration of the air as she rocked it to and fro, trying to get it to quiet down.

"_Too zai zi!_" the woman closest to Jayne hissed.

Jayne could tell by the way the baby was sucking in huge lung fulls of air that it was just getting started. He gritted his teeth as it let out a piercing shriek. In one fluid movement, he had Betty pointed at the baby and it's mama, he'd clicked the safety off noisily. "You shut that thing up," he growled through painfully clenched teeth, "Or so help me god, I will shut it up for you."

His hand was shaking when he lowered the gun. There was the soft sound of a struggle and suddenly the baby was quiet. Jayne didn't think he wanted to know what it's mother did to it to get it to go all quiet like that. He wondered-- briefly, because he didn't like thinking on stuff like that-- what his own mama would think of him threatening a baby and it's mother.

His gut twisted up with guilt, and he wished that the baby would make a noise. Anything, just so long as Jayne could know that it's mama hadn't gotten stupid and hurt it none. But it stayed quiet and Jayne bit back his unease. 

-------------------------------------

Hera was almost a weeks ride from Persephone. It wasn't a pretty planet; it didn't have Bellerophon's oceans or Londinum's big, shiny glass buildings. It was mostly dirt and rock and scraggly trees that hadn't completely grown back in like they should after the Battle of Serenity Valley left them charred down to the stump.

They were headed right for it, too. The place where he'd sent hundreds of men to die for some cause that by the end of it, not one of them was sure about anymore. He was going to have to fly right over it and just the thought of it was making his chest tighten and his stomach turn over like he was going to be sick all over River's shiny leather pilot's seat.

The coordinates that the General had given him was a few hundred miles North of Serenity Valley. They were going to dig in and wait, the Alliance troops would be moving in from directly in front of them before nightfall. For once, it looked like they were going to have the upper hand and Mal silently thanked whoever was listening for small favors.

Inara slipped onto the deck, quiet as a gorram cat. He scowled, that woman could move like River when she wanted to, quick and silent.

"C'mere," he muttered, turning around to face her. Inara's face was drawn and tense and for the first time since she'd been aboard Serenity, she wasn't wearing one of those soft, flowing dresses she wore or silky, billowing pants. She was dressed up in her Corporal's uniform and the coarse material looked strange next to her soft skin.

"You got one last chance to get you, Simon and Kaylee offa here," Mal told her. She lifted her chin defiantly and stretched her arms out so that he could slip the holster over her arms and tighten it around her shoulders.

"We aren't leaving," she told him firmly. Mal pretended not to notice the way her hands trembled when she fitted the standard issue revolver into it.

He'd tried his damnedest to get Inara, Kaylee and Simon to take one of the shuttles and get to the nearest Independent friendly settlement, but the whole lot of them had refused to leave. Inara had stared at him defiantly, like she was daring him to push her into leaving. Little Kaylee'd just shook her head at him. "I ain't leavin' ya, Cap'n," she told him softly, "Wouldn't leave me when I need ya, and I ain't gonna do it to you."

Mal's eyes had flickered over to Simon, who was still laying prone on the sick bed in the infirmary. The doc hasn't said a word yet but he laughed bitterly. "Well," he said coldly, "I can't very well fly the thing myself, can I?"

And it'd been decided, just like that: they were all going into that Valley together. Mal had no question that the Valley was where they'd end up. Truth was, maybe he'd never left it in the first place.

In some sick way, he felt like he was coming home when he saw it stretched out in front of him. The scraggly grass, trying to push it's way up out of the charred ground. The craggy rocks that cropped up here and there-- he remembered how they'd provided cover for him and Zoe more than once. If he half squinted, he imagined that he could still see the slick blood soaking into the thirsty soil. After a while, the dirt had just looked red to him; he figured that it was all the blood.

"Well," he muttered, "If'n your serious, you and Kaylee get Simon armed up and tucked away somewheres he won't be found and get down to the bay with the rest of 'em."

He almost laughed when Inara gave him a little salute before she turned around and all he saw was her back retreating down the stairs. But the weight sitting low in his stomach kept his mouth twisted into a grim frown.

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His troops were lined up in the cargo bay, weapons in their arms and their faces stony. Every single one of them knew what had happened on Serenity Valley. They weren't stupid boys, they read their history books. He could see the dread and fear in every one of their faces. Half of them-- maybe more-- would be going home to their mamas in a body bag.

"A'right," he barked, and their spines snapped straight and their shoulders went rigid. Inara and Kaylee stuck out like sore thumbs and his gut ached when he thought about putting them out there. Especially Lil' Kaylee. He already knew 'Nara was stronger than she looked but Kaylee... she was all sunshine and rainbows. Her face was wide open and guileless and Mal felt downright sick when he thought about what war would do to her. She'd come back broken and too hard, just like he and Zoe had. She'd stop trusting and she'd stop smiling.

"Kaylee, why don't you--"

"Ain't leavin' Cap'n," she told him firmly, her mouth pinched into a nervous line. "I'm goin' where you and 'Nara go. You need me." 

"Simon might need you," he offered, trying to tempt her into staying put with Serenity.

Kaylee's face clouded over and he realized he must have struck a nerve. "Simon don't need me," she muttered, her eyes falling down to stare at Mal's boots like they were the most interesting pieces of leather she'd ever seen.

Mal sighed, long and slow. "Fine. I want everyone digging. Deep enough so we ain't gonna get our heads shot off. It's gonna take some doin', there's rock in that dirt."

"Mal." Inara looks vulnerable when she's not all done up in her fancy dresses and her face all painted up, Mal realized. The uniform was a mite too big for her and the sleeves slipped down past her wrists like a child's sweater.

He was loathe to put a gun in her hands, but he wasn't about to send her and Kaylee out there unarmed just because he didn't like looking at them with weapons in their hands. "That on tight enough?" he hooked his fingers through the straps of her holster, tugging on it. "You got your gun loaded up? Extra ammo? Can't be goin' out there--"

"_Mal_," she said again, more urgently than before. He pulled his eyes away from her revolver and looked down into her face. "I love you," she whispered fiercely.

He turned around before he had to watch her face fall. Mal felt numb as he walked away from her and it took too much gorram work to remember which foot went where and that he needed to _move_.

-------------------------------------

It weren't like Jayne thought he could stay holed up in that cellar forever. Especially with Alliance feds right over their gorram heads. He wasn't that stupid, he knew they were bound to find them eventually.

It took them fifteen minutes after that baby had started squalling to finally pull up that little hatch and drop down into the basement. From there, it was just a blur of shooting and yelling and fighting. Jayne didn't have any doubt that if he left that cellar alive, he wasn't going to leave a free man but gorram if he was going to go easy. He emptied Betty of bullets even though it was too dark to tell if he'd hit anything. He was tugging Sarah out of her holster when he found himself bellied up to the wall, a strong arm pinning one of his behind him. The body was solid and warm and he could feel a gun pressing into his back.

Jayne bucked his body backwards, refusing to give in so easily. "Hold... still..." a hot, sour voice huffed over his shoulder. He drove one elbow back into his assailants gut and knocked the boy back enough that he could wriggle free. He'd just gotten Sarah loose, and raised her up to start shooting in the direction he thought the boy had fallen when he felt something crack him across the back of the neck. Jayne stumbled and the next blow caught him in the temple.

"_Ta ma de_," he grunted weakly, his legs giving out as his eyes rolled up in his head and he collapsed in a messy heap on the dirt floor.

"Someone get me a light down here!" a harsh male voice rasped. Overhead, a thin black flash light lit up and fell with a plunk down into the cellar. It flickered, but remained lit when it hit the hard, dirt packed floor. When the man shone it around the room, he lit on the huddled mess of a mother and her child. Blood was spattered across the both of them, but the woman was still alive. The soldier could just barely make out her chest heaving with erratic breathes. The baby was long dead, it's skin was a sick gray colour and it's little mouth was tinged blue. It's neck hung at an odd angle.

The flashlight's beam darted across the floor and over to the big man sprawled out on the ground. Dark, thick blood was oozing from his temple and his lips were slightly parted and coated with grime. 

"Him," the solider instructed, gesturing with the flashlight beam. "Get him up. That's Major Jayne Cobb," the young man informed them, hocking back and spitting at the dirt near Jayne's feet. "Bring him up, the Captain will want him alive."

Two soldiers shuffled forward, one of them prodding at Jayne sharply with the toe of his boot to make sure that the once-Mercenary was really unconscious and not playing opossum. When Jayne didn't move, they heaved him up to his feet and slung his arms over their shoulders. 

"Should outta kill 'em now," one of the soldiers muttered. "Prisoners are just another mouth to feed and we don't got near 'nuff for us as there is."

The man holding the flashlight scoffed, "Didn't ask you what you thought, Mathis. Now just get his _pi gu_ up there and back to the Deadwood. 

"Is he restrained?" Captain Thomas demanded, pacing his command deck. The Deadwood was small enough that if a man like Jayne Cobb got loose on her, he could have the whole thing under his lock and key before dinner time. And Thomas was not a man who particularly liked taking chances.

"Tied up tight, Sir," the boy said with a curt nod.

The Captain nodded, chewing his bottom lip and considering his options. It was no small thing to have a high ranking Independent officer held prisoner on your ship. Several of the officers had been waiting to claim that honour and, in so far as he could tell, Captain Thomas of the Deadwood was the first of them.

"Take her in there," he instructed, his grey eyes flashing. Not only would he be the first of the lot of them to have a high ranking Independent officer held captive on his boat, but he'd be the first to get first hand intel. "Tell her I want everything." He swung around, the loose skin hanging off of his jowls swaying. "Tell her I want to know every little thought that passes through that _hun dan's_ mind! Everything! From what he had for breakfast this morning to the last time he took a piss." 

The boy nodded sharply, saluted and turned on his heel, disappearing into the holds to summon the girl.

The girl was the best acquisition they'd gotten yet and they weren't often in the habit of getting the best of anything. They weren't a big ship, they didn't have the best artillery and they weren't always in the forefront of the fight. But they'd gotten the girl and that was distinguishable in and of itself.

When the soldier came for her, she was sitting quietly on her bed. It was eerie, the boy thought, how it seemed like she was waiting for him. Just sitting there, her big eyes wide. He could just barely see them, peeking out from behind her long, tangled up hair.

"Captain wants you to be gatherin' intel on the prisoner," he told her, hanging back by the doorway. It wasn't just the fact that she was an Alliance assassin and a Reader than made his skin feel like it would crawl right off his bones. It was that creepy way of looking at a man that she had. Those big dark eyes felt like they would look right through you.

There was a story going around the dorms that the first night she'd been on board, a few of the boys had taken it upon themselves to go and welcome her real proper-like. The first one had stepped through the doorway and she'd pinned him up against the wall with her foot. The rest of them had scattered like cockroaches while the girl had leaned in close and whispered, "_I can kill you with my mind."_ After that, most of the boys had given her a wide berth when they passed her in the hallways.

She stood, all quiet-like and stepped towards the boy. He took a big step backwards, earning him a searching look from the girl. He thought that maybe she liked it that they were all scared shitless of her. They left her alone and it didn't seem like she was much for socializing. They figured she weren't quite right in the head anyways.

He lead her down to the far end of the ship, towards the make shift bunk where Cobb was bound up and still unconscious, last he'd heard. The girl slipped down into the bunk and the soldier hesitated briefly outside of the hatch. He didn't really want to be down there when she did her voo-doo or whatever it was that girl did.

Jayne was still bleeding when River's feet touched the ground. His eyes were squeezed shut but his breathing was heavy and irregular. She could tell that he was conscious, he just wasn't willing to advertise that fact. River trembled as she inched closer to Jayne's still body. 

_Kill him._

The thought was sudden and unbidden and River moaned, low in her throat. She couldn't tell if it was hers or someone else's but it twisted her up and a wave of sickness threatened to knock her under.

Jayne's whole body was rigid as he waited for her to come closer. She knew his hands and feet were bound, but she couldn't underestimate him. He would lash out at her. She knelt down, crawling the last few feet towards him.

"Jayne," she mumbled and she saw his spine go even more rigid, if that were possible.

"Girl?" he mumbled, his voice slurring. His tongue felt too thick and heavy to form the words properly.

River's tiny hands slid along his arms and down to his bound wrists, her nimble fingers plucking at the ropes that were digging into his skin. "She has a name," River muttered. She pulled the rope free and he slowly brought his arms around in front of him. Jayne moved like he'd aged more than ten years in the week since she'd last seen him. 

"What in the sphincter of hell're you doin' here?" he growled. His blue eyes slid over her face, unfocused and hazy. 

"Girl is gathering intel. Meant to read you and report back," she mumbled, her hair sliding down to hide her face again. "Told her not to 'poke around in yer gorram brain' but they told her she should and she doesn't know what to do." River was breaking apart as she worked on the rope binding Jayne's ankles. Her shoulders were shaking and her face was flushed red; her big brown eyes were stinging with tears.

"Why ain't you in that school of yours?" Jayne winced as he pushed himself up into a sitting position, his back pressed against the wall and his hands planted on the ground to hold himself steady. "They finished you already?" 

River shook her head, sending her hair flying around her face. "Double dealing. They packaged the girl up and sold her out from under their noses. Highest bidder," she mumbled, inching closer to Jayne.

Jayne looked up, confused. "The Alliance... sold you... to the _Alliance?_" he demanded, with a sharp laugh. "That don't seem kosherized."

"Isn't," River said softly, drawing her knees up to her chest and pressing her face into the backs of her thighs. "I'm not supposed to be here," she whispered. "Captain doesn't know where I am... couldn't reach peace. Forgot that they only go one way. Only in, never out." 

Jayne huffed a harsh, ragged sounding breath that might have been a laugh if the whole situation weren't so gorram _cao_. "Well I ain't 'sposed to be here neither," he told her. "_Wouldn't_ be here if Mal hadn't taken off with that gorram piece of _go se_ and left me there."

"She isn't--" River protested.

"I know," Jayne muttered, holding up a hand and tilting to one side when his balance was thrown off. "I know. Serenity ain't _go se_. She's the gorram shinest ship in the whole 'Verse."

River sniffled, her shoulders shaking harder. "Aw hell, girl," Jayne grumbled. "Don't go bawlin'. Y'know I didn't mean nothin' by it." 

The girl turned her back to him, hiding her face in the safety of her arms and Jayne felt his stomach clench up at the sight of her heaving back. "C'mere girl," he barked. River didn't look up. "Gorramnit, I told you to c'mere," Jayne insisted, his voice softer.

The girl's hair was stuck in the wetness on her cheeks when she finally burrowed into Jayne's arms. He held her tight until he worried that he would break her into two pieces and settled for rubbing circles between her shoulder blades as gentle as he knew how to be.

"Quit your bellyachin' girl," he told her, trying to keep his own worry and fear out of his voice. "We ain't dead and that's all that matters. Long as we ain't dead we got half a chance."


	12. PART XI

**NOTES:** Eek, I apologize that this took so long. I wonder if anyone even remembers this little WIP::whimpers: Work and school and all of that stupid real life stuff completely drained me. Luckily, 'tis summer and my muse has sobered up long enough to help me finish plotting the end of this monster!

**---------------------------------------**

The floor was hard and cold under Jayne's belly when he woke up. He blinked down at the gray metal through blurry eyes and struggled to sit up. River was a dead weight pressing along his spine. Her nose was buried in the curve of his neck and her breaths were hot little puffs of air against his skin. One of her delicate hands was curled up around one of his biceps.

"Girl," he mumbled, rolling his shoulders and tipping from side to side, trying to pitch her off him. "Girl, wake up," he hissed. River buried her face deeper into his neck and her fingers squeezed his arm tighter.

Jayne sighed. "_River!_"

He could feel her breathing go irregular and he knew she was awake. "Git your skinny ass offa me, girl," Jayne muttered, rocking to one side and tilting River onto the floor. "How long we been asleep?"

"Don't know," River mumbled, her voice still thick with sleep. She struggled into a sitting position and Jayne noticed how hollowed out her cheeks looked. Her eyes were rimmed with dark circles; her movements were sloppy and clumsy.

"You been sleepin' enough, girl?" he demanded, taking her chin roughly in one calloused hand. He tilted her face up so that he could get a better look at her. She was so pale that her skin was tinted gray and there were shadows on her face that hadn't used to be there, even after months and months of fighting a war that she felt responsible for.

"Yes," River mumbled, ducking her chin. Her thick, dark tangles fell over her face like a curtain.

Jayne gently pushed her chin up so that he could see her face. "You tellin' me the truth, girl?"

River's lips pinched into a thin line and she hesitated before she shook her head. Sighing, Jayne scrubbed one rough palm down his face. "Yeah," he said slowly, "Yeah, I know the feelin'. How much time we got, girl?"

Jayne let his hands drop back to his sides when River stood up. "Not long," she whispered, her eyes darting between Jayne and the doorway. "They will be here soon."

"Gettin' too old for this." He pushed himself to his feet, joints cracking. His hands patted his sides, hoping that his guns were still strapped to his hip by some stroke of dumb luck. Amy and Denise were gone; there wasn't anything but an empty holster under his fingers. "We gotta figger us out some way to get outta here, girl," he told her, stomping his booted feet on the floor to get rid of the pins and needles in his muscles.

"Eleven men," the girl said quietly. She was all manner of creepy, standing there with her head tilted just so, like she was listening to something Jayne couldn't hear. "The Captain, his first," she said, taking another step towards the door. "Nine others. Soldiers, all armed. Standard issue weapons. Delores is a bad shot. Peter is decent, but he's slow."

"You readin' all this?" Jayne asked, searching the room for something he might be able to turn into a make shift weapon.

River shook her head, "No. Been here for a week. They talk because they don't think I'm listening. Think I'm trained, house broken. De-clawed." Her big dark eyes caught his and the girl smiled. She held up her hands, fingers spread, "Still has her claws."

Jayne couldn't help but grin, maybe he was rubbing off on the girl after all. "You lookin' for trouble, little girl?" he asked, his teeth a feral flash of white in the dim light.

River's smile faded. "Are you?" she asked seriously. Her fingers were still spread out in front of her, like a hand of cards.

"Aww hell, girl," he laughed. "I'm always lookin' for trouble."

Jayne narrowed his eyes when he caught sight of the air duct high up on one of the walls. The boat they were on couldn't be much newer than Serenity, he figured. All the fancy, new ships he'd ever been on had narrow little slits for ducts. He figured they got wise after too many with thieving on their minds used them to come and go unnoticed.

There was no way that a man Jayne's size could slip in and out of those ducts; his shoulders were too broad by at least six inches. But a girl River's size, with her tiny, bird bones and her narrow hips could wriggle around in those ducts with no one the wiser.

"You trust me, River?"

The girl looked up at him and he wondered how there was room on her face for the rest of her features with those gorram liquid brown eyes looking like they took up the whole thing. She hesitated and finally nodded. Slowly at first and then firmly, with more conviction.

Jayne let out the breath he couldn't remember holding. "Arright then, we got ourselves a plan, girl. But you're gonna have to trust me and I'm gonna have to trust you."

Those eyes blinked and the girl behind them said, "Do _you_ trust _me_?"

The mercenary gritted his teeth. "Yeah, girl. I trust ya."

River was silent long enough for Jayne's heart to hitch in his chest with worry. He had a feeling that she was rooting around in his head, trying to figure out how much truth he was telling her.

"Look, you see that vent all the way up there on that wall?" River turned to look where he was pointing and nodded. "Good, I'm gonna push ya up there on my shoulders and you're gonna crawl up in there, you following me?"

River nodded. "But what about you?" She turned those big eyes on him again, her teeth worrying her lower lip. "You are too big, you will not fit."

"Know that," he told her, leaning against the wall. They'd roughed him up good when they'd brought him on this piece of flying _go se_ and his legs were starting to shake with the strain of holding him up straight. "You're gonna climb up in there and get yourself down to the engine room, you get me?"

River nodded, eyes widening. Either she was grabbing the plan straight out of his head or she was following his train of thought, didn't matter much to Jayne so long as she understood. "The girl will put her to sleep."

"S'right," Jayne mumbled. He was sliding down the wall, head spinning like a top and too weak to hold himself up anymore. River scurried close and took his weight on her shoulders, slowly easing him down until he was crumpled up against the wall like a broken doll, his head lolling on her shoulder.

"Jayne!" River's voice sounded panicked and sharp and her little fingers were scrabbling at the front of his shirt.

"I'm arright, girl," he mumbled, struggling to keep his eyes open wide. "I'm arright, now git. Y'know what ya gotta do."

River's worried face loomed in front of him, so close that he could feel the ends of her hair tickling his cheeks. He forced his eyes open and took her chin in one hand, brushing his thumb across her lips. "Girl," he said, "I'm arright. I ain't gonna tell ya again. So git on out of here and do what I told ya to do."

The girl looked like she was going to argue with him, her teeth worrying her bottom lip. Finally, she nodded; Jayne could barely make out the movements in the dim light. River leaned forward until his vision blurred and he had to close his eyes. She brushed a soft kiss against his forehead and then she was gone, tugging herself out of the grip he had on her.

He listened to the scraping of metal on metal as the girl worked the vent off of the bulkhead. When he couldn't feel her in the room anymore, he closed his eyes and let his spine curve forward until he was slumped over on the ground.

The cat nap he'd gotten with River was the longest he'd been asleep in weeks. His body was beaten, worn down and protesting. But he needed to be ready once River got them powered down. He didn't doubt that she'd do exactly what he'd told her to do. The minute he heard the hiss of the lock on the hatch keeping him holed up down there releasing, he had to be ready to fight himself out. Right at that minute, Jayne didn't feel like he could fight his way out of a wet paper bag.

Time expanded, drew itself out and taunted him. It felt like the girl had been gone hours but logically, Jayne knew it could only have been minutes. It seemed like five more hours had passed before he felt it. He tensed when he felt the slow rumble, vibrating up through the decks and into his bones. The whole ship gave a shake and groaned to a stop. They were dead in the water.

Jayne's mouth twisted into a slow, feral grin when he heard the soft hiss of air and then a faint click. He wouldn't have heard it if he hadn't been listening so closely for it.

He was struggling to find his feet when he heard River land softly underneath the vent. "Jayne?" she asked hesitantly. Her soles made a soft shuffling sound as she felt her way over to him.

"I'm right here, girl," he mumbled, trying to keep his voice down. With any luck, they'd catch those boys by surprise. Of course, it weren't often that luck was on Jayne Cobb's side. "You did good, girl," he told her offhandedly. "Real good."

His muscles clenched involuntarily when she touched him, his whole body was strung up tight in anticipation. She wedged herself under his shoulder and he gratefully leaned some of his weight on her rail thin body. His bones screamed in protest when he climbed the first few rungs of the ladder, but he could hear them scuffling around outside like rats in the walls and the first wave of adrenaline was easing the aches and pains.

"You ready, girl?" he asked, pausing on the very last rung he could climb before his head and shoulders pressed into the closed metal hatchway. River didn't get a chance to answer before the hatch door was ripped away.

Jayne went for their legs, flinging himself over the lip of the hatch and rolling into the soldiers. He used the darkness to his advantage, much as he could. He and River were blind as bats in the pitch black, but so were they. At least they were on equal ground.

He heard the soft slap of flesh meeting flesh with bruising force and staggered to his feet. One hand clung to the smooth metal of the bulkhead behind him and the other swung blindly in front of him as he tried to get his feet back under him.

Later, he didn't know if he'd smelled the air change first-- tingling with the scorched scent of a recently discharged weapon-- or if he'd felt it first. The sharp, ripping pain of a bullet hitting him square in the gut.


	13. PART XII

**A/N: **Sorry it's taken me so long to get around to posting this. It's been on my LJ for ages, I guess I just forgot to upload it here… and then my computer crashed… erm, please to not be killing the Niki?

------

River's fingers trembled around the ship's slick controls. They were slick with blood so dark it looked black. It coated her fingers and trailed down her wrists to her elbows. She was covered in and she didn't know who it belonged to anymore: one of the dead Alliance soldiers lining the hallways or the big man lying on the floor behind her. Some of it, she was sure, was her own; but she couldn't stop long enough to think about that.

If she stopped, she'd have to think. If she stopped, she'd have to think about the lives she'd just taken, the fear and the panicked screaming when she'd _felt_ the bullet rip up Jayne's insides. She'd disobeyed every gruff order not to go poking around in his head-- she'd needed to know where he was so that she wouldn't accidentally find herself fighting with him instead of the Alliance soldiers swarming in the darkness all around them. She'd _felt_ his shock, anger and dismay. She'd felt his pain and then she'd felt nothing and that had scared her more than feeling the pain rolling off of him in thick waves. Because as long as she could feel him hurt, she knew he was alive.

She'd closed her eyes, even though it didn't matter, she couldn't see anything in the inky blackness anyway. But she'd closed her eyes and she'd stopped thinking and she fought. She fought until she was on her knees on the slippery deck and everything was quiet except her ragged breathing. She hadn't needed a safe word to make her stop this time. She'd stopped because there had been no one left alive to fight.

River had felt along the deck, her hands sliding in the blood and bile until she felt something heavy and solid. Her dirty fingers skimmed up his chest and pressed against the bones of his face. With a sob of relief, she pressed herself close to Jayne's body, holding tight handfuls of his shirt in her small fists. He was breathing. She could feel the weak rise and fall of his chest under her cheek. River pressed her messy fingertips into Jayne's neck, desperately searching out a heartbeat. When she found it, hope surged up inside of her and she burst into tears.

It had taken her the better part of an hour to drag Jayne onto the command deck with her. He was a heavy, dead weight in her arms, but the floors were slick and wet and she was determined.

Flying the _Deadwood_ was almost like flying _Serenity_, even if the yokes and buttons were unfamiliar to her nimble fingers. River had almost broken down into dismayed sobs when she realized that the navigation panel had been shot through. It was a mess of sparking wires and broken plexi-glass and she had no idea where they were, they'd been floating dead in space for the better part of two hours.

Now, they were flying blind. The _Deadwood's_ engines were weak and she could feel it's thready pulse through the metal under her bare feet. River's hands were tight fists around the controls, when she let go things started to spiral out of control again. Her mind was a thick mess of fear and panic, but when she had a purpose, a reason, a _mission_, she could force herself to focus.

Relying on her instincts, River adjusted the ship to the left and ignored the self-doubt in the pit of her stomach. If she thought about it, she'd have to acknowledge the fact that she very well could be flying them both into nothing but more empty space.

Behind her, Jayne groaned and River nearly climbed out of her skin. He had been quiet for hours and a niggling little voice in the back of her head had thought he was dead. That he'd died while she'd been trying to patch the engine back together or when she was struggling to set a course. That maybe he'd been dead all along and she was just crazy enough to imagine a pulse and thready breathing.

He'd bled through the scraps of t-shirt she'd tied around his stomach. Her fingers squished in the material as she tugged the strips away from his skin. The knots she'd tied in the fabric were too slippery and tight to pick them apart. River sobbed in frustration, her hands flying up to tug on the ends of her hair, smearing Jayne's blood into the limp strands.

"Hey girl," he growled, his voice was husky with pain and so low she had to lean forward to hear him. "Don't go flyin' to pieces on me, alright?"

River nodded, her teeth digging into her lip. Her fingers were still twined in her hair and she tugged ruthlessly to force her jumbled brain to pay attention to her patient.

"Look, you been doin' good, girl," Jayne said, struggling to touch his fingertips to her cheek. His hand hovered in the air for a few seconds before the strain was too much and he let it fall into her lap. "You been doin' good, don't you fall apart now. There's a knife in my boot..."

River nodded, tugging one hand out of her hair to squeeze Jayne's fingers. The bowie knife was a calming weight in her palm and she wondered how she'd gone from a little girl finding comfort in her favorite dolly, to a half-crazed young woman made saner by the feel of nine inches of steel in her hand.

The knife was sharp, just like she'd expected it to be. It was Jayne's knife, after all; he'd never neglect his girls. She carefully cut the strips of fabric away from the mess of his gut. It was still bleeding, sluggish but steady.

"Gut wounds are bleeders," Jayne's weak voice told her from somewhere to her left. "Gonna have to fix me up yourself, girl. Unless you got that _ji bai_ brother of yours hiding in your pocket."

River shifted uncomfortably. "Not in my pocket," she said, tapping her temple with a bloody finger.

"Well," Jayne muttered. "Ain't that somethin'. Finally puttin' those crazy brains of yours to a use." She could feel him slipping out of consciousness and fear gripped her gut in angry, steel fingers.

"Jayne!" she whimpered, clutching the weak hand in her lap. His eyes were closed but he gave her fingers a quick squeeze before his mouth fell slack and she knew that he was unconscious.

River shuddered and dug her teeth into her bottom lip to stop herself from sobbing. Jayne was right, she couldn't fall to pieces now. If she did, he would bleed out on the cold metal floor.

"T-the human body can b-be drained of blood in eight s-seconds..." River murmured, "Given the proper suction."

She'd once said those words to the Shepard, back when he wasn't dead and she didn't know what they meant anyway. She shuddered again, because now she could comprehend what they meant. Now, she understood the words that tumbled past her lips.

The ships auto-pilot function hadn't been damaged, River had quickly noticed, despite it's close proximity to the navigation. It had kept them on the same blind course for the last half hour.

Pressing a quick kiss to Jayne's forehead, River scampered down the ladder, her toes curling around the metal to keep her from slipping. The ladder was slick with Jayne's blood. It left a filmy, dark trail on the alloy decks where she'd dragged his body onto the command deck with her. River picked her way along the messy trail; where it widened and pooled, she'd stopped to catch her breath. She felt sick, thinking about the time and blood she'd wasted.

But she couldn't let herself dwell on it. She couldn't stop and trail her fingers in it, because that was not what sane girls did. She had enough of her wits about her to know that some of her urges were not normal. Like, gathering all of the congealing blood in her hands and carrying it back to Jayne. She wanted to put it back inside of him, where it belonged. But she understood that not only was that illogical, it would waste precious time and Jayne would die.

The soldiers glassy eyes stared up at her, accusing, and River trembled. "I'm sorry," she whispered, skirting past them. "I'm _sorry_. I had to, but I'm _sorry_." The soldiers didn't blink. They were dead.

She skirted their bodies, slumped over where they'd fallen. Her bare feet squished in the blood and bile that coated the decks in a thick, congealing paste and her stomach turned over. She could see the med lab though. Just a few more feet and she would have everything she needed. She could run back to Jayne and hole herself up on the command deck and pretend that there weren't a dozen or more dead bodies beneath them.

A body was stretched out carelessly in the doorway to the med lab. _Delores_, River thought. _Bad shot_. Her whole body trembled and her eyes clamped shut, but she forced herself to step over him, taking care not to touch the body.

When she heard the click and whine of a gun's safety being turned off, she froze.

-------

Kaylee slipped hesitantly into the med bay. He was awake, she knew he was. She had spent months sleeping next to him, she knew the way his mouth slackened when he slept. She'd watched him sleep, she knew the pattern in his breathing almost as well as she knew Serenity's insides.

He was awake, but he kept his eyes squeezed tightly shut. It hurt her to know that he wanted her to think that he was asleep, it meant that he didn't want to talk to her. He didn't want to see her.

Kaylee had been giving him his space. He'd snapped at her and he'd shut her out and it hurt, she was keeping her distance for herself as much as she was for him. She hated the way he could hit her right where it hurt. She loved him so much, but some times it was so hard not to hate him.

"Simon?" she whispered, shifting a little closer. She wanted to reach out and take his hand, but she knew he'd just flinch away. It hurt more to watch him pull away than it did to not even try in the first place. "I know you're awake, Simon," she said, her voice flattening. He'd made the wound weeks ago, now he just kept throwing salt in. She knew he was hurting, she knew that he was in so much pain, but she wanted to help him. She wanted to be there for him, to make things better for him if she could. She didn't love him any less just because he couldn't walk. He was still Simon Tam, _her_ Simon.

"What do you want?" his voice was emotionless, cold. He was completely shutting down on her, Kaylee realized sadly.

She forced her mouth into a smile, but she knew that it must have looked more like a grimace. It didn't matter though, he wouldn't look at her anyways. "Cap'n says we're 'bout a day away from Hera."

"Ok," Simon muttered. She waited, unconsciously holding her breath, for him to say something else. _Anything_ else. But Simon stayed silent and she felt like someone had added another ten pounds onto her shoulders.

"Ok," she murmured too. "Ok, I'll leave you 'lone. I get it."

He didn't stop her when he left, didn't even open his eyes.

Kaylee shoved her fist against her mouth to keep the sobs inside. If she didn't cry, she wouldn't break. She knew... she knew that if she started crying, she would never stop. She'd worked so damn hard to get him to open up to her in the first place and now all that work was for nothing. All that love was for nothing.

_No!_ she chastised herself. She loved him, she loved Simon. It wasn't for nothing. She repeated it to herself, over and over, as she slid down the wall outside of the med bay. Kaylee drew her knees in against her chest and pressed her face into her hands, letting herself cry for the first time since this whole mess had started.

She was going to war, for real this time. She wasn't going to be sequestered away on some border colony the war hadn't touched yet, waiting for Mal, Jayne and River to come back from a war that she could only think about in abstract terms. There weren't any safe places near Hera, not anymore. They didn't have the time to go lookin' for a place.

"_Mei-mei?_"

Kaylee lifted her tear streaked face and Inara held out her arms, enveloping Kaylee and holding her tight. Kaylee buried her face into th ex-companions neck, breathing in the scent of her perfume.

"Oh _mei-mei_," Inara whispered, pressing soft kisses into the mechanic's hair. "I know. I'm scared too."

"We gonna die?" Kaylee whimpered, between choked sobs.

"No, _mei-mei_," Inara told her firmly. She pressed Kaylee in closer, as much to comfort her as to stop her from seeing the uncertainty on her face. "No, we're gonna be just fine."


	14. PART XIII

**A/N: **Umm, sorry this took so long, kids. I was laptop-less for several months and it took me a little while to get back into this whole writing thing. The next part is waiting for my beta to finish ripping into it and will be up shortly, I hope.

---------------------------

1River's entire body tensed, muscles contracting and going stiff. It was pitch black inside the med bay. It was pitch black inside the entire ship. The running lights lining the deck floors weren't even flickering. The engine was barely churning enough to push them through space at a crawl.

She shifted her weight to the left, testing whoever it was standing in front of her. If she couldn't see them, maybe they couldn't see her. Maybe they wouldn't notice as she crept around behind them and... she didn't really want to think about what she would have to do to them after that. It made her sick seeing the bodies piled up at her feet and know that she'd been the one to send them to their creator. Shepard Book would have said God, but Shepard Book was dead.

"Don't move!" the voice insisted, urgent. "Don't move or I swear I will kill you."

River froze, mentally running through the odds of being able to dodge the bullets. Kill the man before he killed the girl. Her body was screaming at her to act, to react. To kill. But her mind reeled with the complications. The morality. The fear. They'd obviously made her wrong, she thought. They made her mixed up and confused. They'd forgotten that she was just a girl, not a machine. A machine that killed with no regret or fear or confusion. A machine that did not question the right or wrong of it.

The _Deadwood_ lilted to the left and the lights flickered on. The gun barrel was pointing somewhere to her left. She could move. Now. It would have to be now but she could kick the gun out of his hand. Disarm the shaking, terrified young soldier. One hand was clenched tight around the grip of his piece, his skin stretched white over the bone. The other hand was pressed into a bleeding wound in his side. His skin was gray and sallow. He was dying. The soldier quickly adjusted his aim, pointing the pistol so that the shot would hit her dead in the chest. The lights flickered off again and the ship tilted towards the right.

River's entire body tingled with fear. Every second she stood there, frozen in front of the wounded young soldier's gun barrel, Jayne was dying. She was wasting precious minutes, minutes she couldn't afford to lose. She could almost feel them, slipping between the cracks in her fingers. She wanted to kneel down and pick them all up, put them back where they belonged. She wanted to give herself more time. She understood that this was not normal. This was not something that normal girls thought.

The ship lurched again, the lights flickering and casting a yellowish-green tint on the gray industrial walls and floors. She caught brief glimpses of the soldier, his hands shaking around the grip of his gun. The lights faded out again and River was plunged back into the darkness, little yellow spots of light flickering in front of her. She reached out to grab one of them, but it danced away. The ship keeled to the right, the lights were brighter than before. They blinded her, gleaming off of the steel surfaces.

"Don't," the soldier choked.

And then his face was gone. River blinked in surprise, her mouth falling open. She staggered forward, fingers outstretched. He faltered, swaying on his feet for a few seconds. Then his knees buckled and he fell forwards. He hit the dirty floor with a wet thud and River cringed, her stomach clenching. Behind her, Jayne staggered through the doorway. His bloody fingers were clenched around one of his girls. River didn't remember her name. His other hand was pressed against his gut. His legs gave out and he dropped the gun, grabbing onto the door frame and struggling to hold himself up.

"Jayne!" River shrieked. Her voice sounded strangled. In one fluid movement she slipped herself under his arm and strained to support his weight. She half-dragged him over to one of the long examining tables.

His face was drawn up tight with pain, his lips were a pale, thin line. He grabbed her chin with his big blood smeared fingers, his eyes were blue slits. "You do this right, you hear me?"

River nodded and his grip loosened. Jayne muttered under his breath and then his mouth went slack. River gritted her teeth and squared up her shoulders. She had to do this right. There wasn't another option.

Inara's hands shook in her lap. She folded them together tighter, chewing on her lip. Mal's back was rigid and straight in front of her. He hadn't looked at her in hours. She hated to admit how much that hurt. They were flying into what might be the turn-point battle in this entire war and she was upset because he wouldn't look at her.

"Are we there?" Kaylee whispered, peeking around Inara's shoulder. "Is that it?"

There were only three of them left. Three, Inara thought. Once, there had been nine. Before this whole war, before the Operative, before everything... there had been nine. Then there had been six and a half, because Zoe was never quite a whole person again after she'd lost Wash.

And now there were three. Jayne and River were gone, maybe dead. Maybe worse. Inara didn't know, she couldn't let herself think about it. If she did, she would break. Simon was comatose, laying motionless in the med lab. He was there, but he wasn't. Inara sometimes thought that maybe it would have been better if he'd died on Persephone. Maybe it would have been better, for Kaylee's sake, if he'd died in her arms from the shock and blood loss. In the long run, anyway. She always feels sick and guilty when she thinks things like that.

There were three, now, and if Inara stopped to think about that for too long, she would crumble. She didn't think that Kaylee and Mal could survive on their own.

"Not yet, _mei-mei_," Inara whispered when Mal didn't answer her. "I don't think that's it."

She didn't know though. She'd never been to Hera. It had been a bombed out mess most of her life and before the first war, it just wasn't one of the places that a child of her status went. It wasn't one of the core cities.

Serenity banked to the left, hard, and Kaylee's weight shifted roughly into her. Inara wrapped her arms around the younger girl to steady her. Kaylee's arms twined around Inara's waist until they were both holding on to each other for dear life. Not because of the turbulence, but because both of their worlds were crumbling down on top of them.

"Inara?" Kaylee whispered.

Inara glanced down into Kaylee's big, scared eyes. There was a question there that Inara didn't know the answer to. She wished she did. Or at least, she wished she could lie well enough to make Kaylee believe that she did. At least one of them would be ok. Less broken and terrified.

"I don't know, _mei-mei_," she murmured into Kaylee's hair. "I don't know."

River's hands trembled when she finished the last stitch, pulling it tight and tying it off the way she's seen Simon do millions of times. She shivered and trailed her shaking fingers over the little black rows of train tracks dotting Jayne's chest.

She had no idea what she would do, alone on a ship full of dead men, if he did not wake up. If she'd somehow messed up and hurt him instead of kept all of that wet, sticky redness inside of him, she had no idea what she would do.

His mouth was slack and a line of clear saliva slid down his chin and into the creases of his neck. It was frothy red with the blood that was caked an inch thick to his skin in some places. River tugged her sleeve down over her fingers and rubbed at his skin but the messy fabric only smeared him with more blood until he looked like some macabre painting.

River's stomach clenched into knots and she pushed down harder, scrubbing at his cheek with her fingertips. Suddenly, it made her physically ill to see the dirty brown and red bloodstains on his ashen skin. Her stomach flipped and twisted, she doubled over and retched violently. Her dry throat ached and her body shook and heaved, she was empty.

Exhausted, River sank down on her trembling knees. Her dirty, thin fingers clenched around Jayne's limp, bloodstained hand as she slowly let herself slip to the floor. She'd never been this tired before. She felt like the people on Miranda must have felt, once the Pax seeped into their lungs and coated the insides of their blood vessels; the ones that didn't turn into Reavers. She felt like she could close her eyes and sleep forever. She felt like that would be ok. She closed her eyes and squeezed them shut until she could see tiny little pin pricks of light dancing on the backs of her eyelids. Every muscle in her body feels like an overstretched rubber band. Stretched and stretched until it loses its shape.

It hadn't changed much in the years and years since that Independence transport ship had dropped him on this hunk of dead earth the first time around.

Of course, there had been a few less bombed out craters, a few more trees the first time he'd first laid eyes on Hera. It was like she'd never gotten over the war, just like all of them that'd been there the first time around. The land had never finished grieving either. All the blood that had soaked down into the dirt had salted the earth, nothing grew on Hera anymore. Nothing lived on Hera anymore.

Mal could remember every rock, every crest and valley just like he could remember the trembling fear deep in his belly the first time he'd ever laid eyes on Serenity Valley. All the memories were there, burned into him. Part of him. He couldn't out run it, no matter how much he tried.

The sky was dark, darker than it had any right to be in mid-morning. Dust, thick and brown, filled up the air. It coated Serenity's windshields and left a thick layer of grime on hull. It made it that much harder but not impossible to see the Valley looming up in front of them.

The tops of the ridges leading down her rocky sides were crumbling and eroded. Every explosion stripped a little more away. They were still a good mile and a half back, but Mal could almost taste the sulfur and dust on the back of his tongue. It would coat their lungs when they stepped out of the ship, they would cough up wet, dirt months after this was all over.

"_Lao tien_," he whispered. "We're going to die."


	15. PART XIV

**A/N: **Uhh, please to not be killing the Niki? No torches or angry mobs, either plz.

---------------

It took River a full five minutes to figure out if her eyes were open or closed. She pressed her stained fingers into her eyes until they ached. She couldn't see anything, not even her own hands, inches away from her face.

Her stomach twisted painfully and panic climbed up her ribcage, threatening to spill out of her mouth. Jayne. She couldn't see Jayne and if she couldn't see him that meant that he could conceivably no longer _be_ there. Not where she left him.

River's thin hands grasped nervously at the stale, dank air, fluttering in the darkness. Every second felt like a year until her fingers grasped his thick forearm. She squeezed, her fingers sinking into muscle and skin, desperate for something to hold onto.

"Girl, you're gonna draw blood you keep that up," he muttered. His voice was low and harsh, like he'd smoked too many cigars or like the inside of his throat was raw and bleeding. And it was the most beautiful thing that River had ever heard.

A pause. And just when she'd started to think that maybe she was dead and this wasn't real or maybe she just really was _that_ crazy, he said, "Girl?" he sounded worried. Concerned. River began to consider that maybe she really _was_ dead. "River," he conceded, finally. She could count on one hand the times he'd called her River. "You gonna say something?"

"I didn't kill you," she said, her voice flat. It wasn't really a statement of fact but she was too tired to put the extra effort into making it a question.

"Don't look like it," Jayne muttered and she could feel him shifting under her trembling hands. "But I'm startin' to think maybe it'd be better if'n ya did."

River's fingers squeezed a little tighter, mostly involuntarily. "Are you—does it hurt, that much?" she asked softly. Mostly just to fill up the silence. She knew it hurt, he screamed it at her with every breath. But the darkness was too quiet and she was afraid of the bodies piled up in the hallways and the endless space outside of the Deadwood's windows. So she keeps talking and she hoped that Jayne would play along, just for once, and talk back.

"Nah, girl," he said after a minute. "Don't hurt near as bad as it could."

The silence was stretching out too long.

"You did good," he said finally; gruffly. River could count on one hand the times that Jayne's told her that she's done good. She's starting to honestly believe that she's dead and this is the glorious afterlife that she's earned for herself. A few off the cuff compliments from Jayne; compliments that she wouldn't trade for a dozen glowing declarations of love from another man.

"Their dead," she muttered. It's not exactly what she meant to say, but she can't take it back now. The way the muscles in his arm jumped, she knew that he'd heard her. She felt him shift under her stiff fingers, and her whole body tensed up at first when his fingers threaded awkwardly into the dirty tangles of her hair.

He doesn't say anything and she doesn't have to know what he's thinking to know that it's because he doesn't know what to say to her. But his rough fingertips massaged the back of her head and that was enough. River closes her eyes and pressed her face into Jayne's side, careful of the thin row of stitches keeping his insides under his skin.

She felt so heavy and listless. It scared her that she couldn't see why it would be so wrong to curl up here, pressed into Jayne's side and never move again. She's beginning to understand the people who just lay down and died on Miranda. It would be so easy.

Too easy.

River pressed her eyes closed tighter and willed herself to stop thinking.

-----------

Kaylee's stomach clenched into a tight, heavy knot.

"Don't say that," she whispered. All of the air went whooshing out of her body with that one sentence. Her chest squeezed painfully and she was just so tired. Her whole body felt heavy and clumsy. "Cap'n," her voice was soft, she was wheezing her words because there was no air left in her entire body. "Don't say that. We're gonna be just fine."

Mal's shoulders were rounded and sagging. She wanted to put her arms around him and comfort him but she didn't have anything left inside of her to give to him. He looked so much like a little boy, scared and alone, that it made her whole body ache.

This was her captain. This was the man she'd followed blindly for years. He was a broken down man, staring out at the stuff that kept him up every night until he drank half a bottle of whiskey just to make it stop. A man who had been pushed so far that he'd lost the will to fight anymore.

For the first time, Kaylee was terrified; achingly terrified. She's been scared before, sure. She'd been scared since the very beginning. Fear wrapped itself up around her gut the first time she'd put on her uniform, the first time she'd watched Serenity fly off to fight the righteous fight with out her. It stayed, even when she shouldn't have been afraid anymore. It kept her up nights, wrapped up in Simon and blankets. It kept her from flying apart under Simon's hands in the middle of the night after he'd washed all the blood from the dead soldiers he worked so hard to fix off of his body.

But she had never been terrified; because her Cap'n was a good and fearless man. Because he knew what he was doing and she'd always trusted in that above anything else. And now, he was telling her that they had lost. They were going to die.

Inara's hands squeeze Kaylee's. She's trying to be strong, but Inara had always been soft. As much as Kaylee wanted to believe her when she whispered, "Shh, _mei mei_, it's going to be ok. He's just worried, it's nothing" into her hair, she couldn't.

Because Mal said that they are all going to die and suddenly, for the first time, Kaylee has to consider that she might never see her ma and pa again. She might never slide under Serenity's engine with a wrench in her hand. She might never breathe in a deep lungful of real air after months of breathing in Serenity's filtered oxygen.

"Sorry," Mal muttered. His voice was so soft and broken that Kaylee had to lean forward, towards his sloping back to hear him, "So sorry, Lil' Kaylee." His words were slurred with grief, like he'd been drinking, but Kaylee knew that he was stone cold sober.

Her whole body was trembling when she pulls herself out of Inara's arms. Black dots swam in front of her eyes and she had to press her hands against Serenity's bulkheads to keep herself standing up straight. She stumbled desperately towards the infirmary but it was mostly out of habit than a real need to be in the same room with Simon.

Her Simon was gone, replaced with someone hollow and bitter. In the space of a few nights, he had slipped through her fingers and disappeared. But it was so automatic, her body seeking him out on it's own with out any help from her. She didn't know what else to do, so she felt her way blindly into the infirmary.

His eyes were closed and he was so pale. She can almost believe that he's dead and this is his wake. But his chest rises and falls every time his lungs expand. Simon's eyes stayed closed as she tripped her way over to him. Her weak knees gave out and she slid down to the floor, her fingers clenching handfuls of the bed sheets.

"Simon," she choked out. Her throat was tight with tears and she didn't think she'd taken a full breath in fifteen minutes. "I need you. Please." She hated that she was begging him. "I need you."

Simon squeezed his eyes shut tighter.

---------

River didn't know how long she'd been sleeping with her face buried against Jayne's side. She knew he wasn't asleep, his fingers were still clumsily rubbing her head and his breath was too uneven.

"You awake, girl?" His voice was still ragged and he sounded so tired. It scared her, it sounded like the fight had gone out of him. His rough, deep voice sounded defeated and old.

"Yes." She sat up and his hand slid down to the back of her neck, his fingers brushing the knob of her spine. For a second, she wondered if he was as reluctant to break the contact as she was.

"Listen," he said quietly.

She heard it then, so soft that if he hadn't told her to be listening for it, she never would have picked up on it on her own. It was a dull buzzing, the kind she'd heard Serenity emit more times than she can count on one hand.

"You hear that?" he asked.

"Yes." River rocked back on her heels and struggled to her feet.

"Good," Jayne sounded genuinely relieved. "I ain't just conjurin' it up in my head."

River was already half-way towards the door. Her fingers pressed against the bulkheads, rough with dried up blood, to keep her balance. The ship was starting to tilt. It almost wasn't noticeable, except she was expecting it.

The buzzing got louder the closer she got to the command deck. The little running lights dotting the narrow corridor were on, they were dim but they made the pitch darkness a little less complete; a little less final. River's heart skipped when she reached the bottom rung of the ladder and stepped down onto the deck. The buzzing sound was insistent and consuming; relentless.

They were heading for a collision.

--------------

"You stupid selfish man." Inara was seething. She was so angry with him that she was shaking. Her hands were trembling to wrap around his neck. Her whole body felt like she'd been stretched and pushed and pulled just a little too far.

He was giving up. He was giving up on himself and them and every single boy in the cargo bay, the ones who looked up to him with stars in their eyes and hung on his every word. The ones who waited, eager for him to lead them into battle and make them heroes. The ones who trusted him to keep them alive.

And he was giving up.

"You stupid, stupid…" she broke off, the words dying on her tongue. Mal's slumped shoulders were shaking, his face buried in his hands.

Silently, Inara wrapped her thin arms around him, pulling him into her. The anger faded away and in its place was cold and desperate fear.

He was breaking apart and what hope did that leave for the rest of them?

She slipped in front of him, sinking down to her knees. Her slim, shaking fingers pried his hands away from his face. His eyes were red and terrified. There was so much fear on the ship, Inara wondered how they could all breathe with it taking up so much space.

"It's going to be ok," she lied. Her hands were trembling as she pressed them into his cheeks, holding his face steady, making him meet her eyes. "Everything is ok."

He laughed and it was the most bitter sound that Inara had ever heard. "Nothin' is ok," he told her in a ragged voice. "I got four members of my crew left and a boatful of boys all lookin' to me for their answers. And I'm clean out of answers, Inara."

All of her Companion training, she thought bitterly, and she can't think of one thing to say to this man to make everything ok. But her training didn't cover acts of war. Brutality so horrible that her chest ached just thinking about it. And she knows that she hasn't seen the half of it. She's seen the causalities, the dead bodies stacked up like kindling in the cargo bay. She's helped Simon planet side while he performed meatball surgery on the pieces of human being they brought back from the battlefields. But she hasn't seen the things that Mal has seen. She's been skirting the edges of the battlefields for months, more or less safe. More or less sheltered.

"It's going to be ok," she repeats, automatically. Because that's the only thing she's got left to say. She's just as afraid as he is. Just as terrified as Kaylee. "It's going to be ok."

--------------

The Deadwood is shaking like she's coming apart at the seams. Like she's going to split open and spit out everything inside of her. River's hands are trembling on the yoke, not from fear this time but from the amount of pressure it takes to hold the ship steady.

She's been Serenity's pilot for months, but she knows that she will probably never be as good as Wash once was. She knows that Wash would be able to find some way to recover them from the nosedive the Deadwood has plunged itself into.

Wash could, she knows, but River can't.

"I'm a leaf on the wind," she whispers. But it doesn't bring her any comfort. Her hands can't caress intricate maneuvers and miracles out of a ship the way his could.

They are heading towards the atmosphere of a black-brown looking planet at full burn. She knows enough to know that if they try to break atmo at this speed, the entire ship will come undone. She and Jayne and all of the dead men would burn and be ash before the ship's wreckage hit the ground. The thought alternately comforts and terrifies her. It terrifies her that to some degree it comforts her. She's just so tired, she just wants to sleep.

River closes her eyes, fingers still in a death grip around the Deadwood's controls. Her gut tells her to lean to the left, and she does but she isn't expecting a miracle at this point.

Right, it says and she does. But she knows that they are going to die.

River pulls up on the yokes, because the little voice in the back of her head, that gut feeling again, it tells her to pull up. The air is getting thinner, they're pushing through atmo too fast. Too quick.

Everything feels like it's spinning and the dashboard panel is glowing and it's so beautiful when it spins, she thinks. Her fingers still tight around the controls, River closed her eyes and the Deadwood continued to fall.


	16. PART XV

**NOTES:** Wow, so, it's been forever and six days since I've updated this. And I'm sure that no one is even reading anymore but I have to finish this. It's been niggling at me for the past year and a half despite my entirely too busy schedule. So, even if it's just me reading this thing, it's something that I definitely have to finish up.

-----------------------------

Mal brought Serenity down down on an outcropping of rock far enough away from where the Alliance was digging in that they were safe from enemy fire. Down below them, their own troops were already digging in, turning up the rocks in the soil on their shovels. Smart boys, they were pushing all the rocks up around the holes they were digging. Just what Mal himself had done all those years ago.

Trying anything to keep the Alliance from blowing their fool heads off. He weren't half as good as River and he wasn't stupid enough to think that he could touch Wash. The ship was hidden best as he could, but he wasn't stupid enough to think that they wouldn't see it if they were looking for it. But he had to hope that maybe they wouldn't be looking for it.

They were leaving Simon a sitting duck. Sticking a gun in his hand and leaving him because there wasn't anything else he reckoned that they could do. It'd be worse to have him down in the trench with them and there weren't any sympathizing moons anywhere close enough to Hera to leave him.

Mal felt like the whole weight of the 'verse was bending his shoulders to breaking. But it figured he would be, he'd left Serenity Valley years and years ago but Serenity Valley had never left him. It didn't leave Zoe neither and he figured that maybe it never left none of them who got out with their lives. His hands loose around Serenity's yoke, he bent his head down until his hair was brushing the control panel. Serenity's belly was full of young boys, waiting to die with their boots strapped on tight. Lil' Kaylee and 'Nara down there with them, holding guns in their shaking hands. And it weren't right but there weren't nothing he could do about it.

Not now, anyway.

Sighing, he pulled himself out of the chair. Wash's dinosaurs were still covering the dash, River's good luck charms, he guessed. Not that they'd brung her _or _Wash much in that respect.

%%%

His arms and legs felt heavy, like they were made out of lead. It took him a good five minutes to force his eyes open. He was buried underneath a heap of what had once been the Deadwood, now it reminded him of so much scrap metal. Twisted hunks of it, weighing him down.

Panic shot through Jayne, quick and hot as any one of his knives. "Girl!" he bellowed. The last thing he remembered was them falling, straight out of the sky.

Using whatever was left of his strength, Jayne wrenched himself free. His body was cut up and bruised, shot threw more than once, but he was standing and he guessed that that was enough. It was enough for now. "Girl!" using what must have been the very last of his strength, he picked his way through what was left of the _Deadwood_. Best he could figure, the ship must have come apart falling through atmo.

Jayne did a quick mental inventory, he hurt like hell. His head was pounding and he thought that maybe there was more dried blood on the outside of his body than there was inside of his body. But he was breathing and that had to count for something.

Now, he had to find the girl. He wondered, briefly, how much of her there was left to find. He was an ornery old man and maybe it would take more than a crashing on some _gou shi_ planet to kill him. But the girl, she was soft and malleable and she weren't nearly as tough and pig headed as he was.

He'd always said he was too stubborn to die. He was beginning to wonder just how true that was.

His hands were bleeding, fingers a raw and torn up mess from peeling back layer after layer of burnt up metal. Pulling off what was left of the t-shirt on his back, he split it into two and hastily wrapped up his hands. The fabric felt like it was rubbing him raw, but it was better than nothing.

He'd been digging around for what felt like hours, but maybe it had only been minutes, when he found her hand, poking up out of the mess. Jayne's stomach clenched up into knots and he squeezed his eyes shut when he heaved up the piece of the control panel that was covering her and tossed it to the side. It took him a minute to pry his eyes back open, scared that maybe when he looked down he'd still just see a hand. That maybe all he was doing out here was finding enough pieces of her to give her a proper burial.

But when he opened his eyes, the girl was laying there, cut up and looking for all the world like she'd been put through a meat grinder. Lifting her up, her body felt like there weren't any bones left in it. She was limp, her head dipping down so low over his arm that her hair brushed the ground.

"_Cao ni zu zong shi ba dai_," Jayne cursed. He weren't Simon, he didn't know a spit of nothing about doctoring nobody and the girl looked like she needed more than a couple of bandages and a few days rest.

With fingers that felt too big and clumsy, he felt around at the base of her neck until he could make out a pulse. It was slow and a little thready but it was there. And that was enough for him, for now. He needed to get her as far from the wreckage as he could, but he could barely keep his self on his feet. It was sure to have drawn some attention and he didn't even know where they were, let alone who's attention it would have drawn. Alliance, Independence or something else entirely. For all Jayne knew, they could have crash landed themselves on a planet crawling with Reavers and by sun up they'd both be dead anyways.

%%%

Mal squared up his shoulders, he knew he had to pull himself up by the bootstraps. There was a boat load of boys down there that were looking to him for the answers. And he had to give them one, right or wrong. He had to believe enough that it was right to convince them. To convince Kaylee and 'Nara that they were all doing the right thing following him into war.

Running the palms of his hands down his face, Mal felt like he'd aged twenty years in the last week. His clothes felt too heavy, like they were pushing his body down to the floor. Everything felt too heavy.

Just two years ago, he'd have said things were as good as they could get. He'd have said that there was no way he would be setting foot back on Hera soil or that he'd be wearing the Independence colors into war again. Would have said no way he'd be putting a gun into lil' Kaylee's hands and marching her along with him. Wouldn't have even begun to think that things would end like this.

And there wasn't a doubt in his mind that things _would_ end.


End file.
